coin mechanism

[dannyyy]

I bought myself a S.E.C.I. RM4 coin mechanism on ebay. It was a bargain so I thought to make a good deal.
Problem now is, that I can't find documentation on the thing and I don't know how to make it work.
I want to put it in my mame cabinet that I'm working on but I don't know if its possible to connect the RM4 to my computer.

anyone knows how to do this?
thanks

[Ken Layton]

I have no idea what you're talking about. A picture please of the object in question.

[dannyyy]

the mechanism is this one.
www.highway.net.au/img_parts/img_3985.jpg

does anyone have an idea how to wire it to a pc to use in mame?

[Green Giant]

It says to connect it, "Connects to the credit board through a 10 pin cable."  Doubt anyone on here can connect it.  No simple switches.  You will have to read a signal from the board.  If you have access to a potentiometer, you could hook it up and try and read the signals out of the mech.

[HighNoon]

If you have access to a potentiometer, you could hook it up and try and read the signals out of the mech.

Do you mean a multi-meter?


Not trying to be rude, you might know some cool way of reading voltages I don't. 

[superbigjay]

hello dannyyy.

I've found this pdf.

www.alca-coin.com/files/05%20R6.1%20eng.pdf

That coin mech is programmable and very flexible.  But it will be difficult to hook up...

It can accept different coin/token and you can assign a value to each of them.
The thing is that it;s using its 10 pins connector and some sort of serial encoding to
inform the "money board" what value was inserted...

goodluck,
Jay

[superbigjay]

this is the same website with all the products they support...

http://alca-coin.com/eng/index25dc0.html?p=pro&n1=menu

this is probably the pdf that has the validator info:
http://alca-coin.com/files/05%20R6.1%20eng.pdf

have fun...
 

[MonMotha]

The manual claims that there is a 4 pin connector at RS-232 levels.  This could be hooked up to a standard PC serial port with a suitable (possibly custom-made) cable.  Documentation for the protocol it speaks is supposedly on their website, but I have not looked.  They seem to call this "master mode".

Once you have it hooked to your serial port, you would then simply run a program in the background to monitor the serial port for the coin device to speak and take appropriate action (such as artificially generating a keypress) when it does so.  This would be much easier than using the other interface on there.

If you don't have a serial port, one of the USB to RS-232 serial adapters should work for this purpose as it appears to actually be sending serial data, not bit-banging the handshaking lines.

[Green Giant]

Oops, wasn't thinking of a meter at all.  Had a brain fart there.  What I meant to say was an oscilloscope.  Figured this coin mech might send varying signals that could be read by an oscope.  Out of school for a little while and you start forgetting everything.

[dannyyy]

thanks for the replies. I'll try to figure out what the easiest option is for me.
If I can get it to work, I'll let you know.

greets,
Dannyyy