Networked Smart Coin Collector

Abstract

The study attempts to investigate an innovative solution for automating the small and medium cash transactions. The small cash transactions drive with coins all the time. The study focused on charitable donations which add up millions of coins each month. In many countries coin collecting, coin counting and coin processing are still done manually. The investigation has done to make this manual process automated and intelligence. Two coin machines were selected from two different vendors. Coin machines were trained to identify and release a unique coin code per each coin. A system has implemented to make coin process more intelligence. Four modules have implemented to get work done. The device module has programmed to accept coins and send the unique code to the client application. The client application module has developed to convert coin code to its market value and updates backend server with the new value and then trigger a coin event to web socket server. Raspberry pi device has configured as the client application of the system. The backend server module has developed for user authentication, to interact with the database and send new updates to client web portal. The web socket server module has integrated to real-time update subscriber’s web portal. Sri Lanka’s latest coin types were used to accomplish the objectives. Experiments were done to confirm that the coins are accurately identified by the machine. Coin data updated in realtime to the user dashboards with expected minimum latency of 200miliseconds. Alert notifications have triggered when the coin box exceed its limit of 75% and 100% in percentage. All Sri Lankan coin types were able to train to the coin machine for identification. Coin machine returned unique code for each coin. This coin code converted into its real value and then sent to the user dashboard within average 300miliseconds of time. The dashboard is generated from history coin data that are saved in the database server. This data is displayed in graphical formats by using graphs, charts, and tables. Alert notification successfully triggered to indicate coin box status by the back-end server after calculating fill status with the help of coin algorithm. The first conclusion is that the coin machines can be used as IoT device in order to obtained benefits in various subject areas such as saving home wasted coins in a valuable manner, bus ticketing, smart vending machines etc. The second conclusion is that web socket data communication can be integrated with IoT devices to achieve real-time information sharing via TCP network connectivity. The third conclusion is that a coin algorithm could be used to identify the coin volume of a container object such as coin safes or coin boxes.