Premise

At Wonderful Weekends, Google threw a mini-festival for three days of music, food and fun. Deeplocal created the main attraction, a giant, nearly two-story gumball machine that dispensed prizes from a variety of local Chicago businesses, as well as a number of smaller interactive exhibits.

My Role

The giant gumball machine consisted of seven stations each with a 60″ display, an oversized coin slot and turnstyle and four knobs representing a different prize category (food, adventure, entertainment, shopping). The screen instructed the user to insert a giant coin in the slot, rotate the turnstyle, and select and pull a knob. Next an animated story played on the screen while a prize was dispensed in a big plastic gumball. I specced all electrical components including sensors and switches. I designed a custom PCB and wrote the firmware to control the Gumball Machine stations, implementing a state machine to sense coin insertion, recognize turnstyle rotation and knob pulls, control actuators for gumball dispensing, illuminate LEDs appropriately and communicate to the main computer. I also did a lot of integration work, creating mechanical mounts for sensors and switches as well as designing wiring for audio and signal distribution.