Money Counter

[win1for]

Hi Guys,

Please forgive me if this place is not the right place to post this question. Kindly point me to the right place. Thanks.

At the moment i want to build a machine that counts money (money counter machine). When the user puts in the money bills (and if possible coins as well), it will scan them and count them and send the results to a program running on a PC.

I really don't know the kind of hardware i need to build this machine. I have been googling for a while but can't seem to find any place that will give me a good answer.

I will also create a software that will receive the counting from the machine. Creating the software is not a problem. What i need now is how to build this machine and where to get the hardwares. Infact i would like to know if the NXT brick will also help me in this project.

My main concern now is which hardware do i need to create this machine and probably where to get them.

Please all your suggestions are welcome and if you know any site that will help me, kindly point me to the site.

Thanks a lot guys.

[lawrie]

This would be an extremely difficult machine to build with Lego.

Whether it is at all possible depends on how accurate it needs to be.

For paper money, you would first have to build a machine that sucked in a paper bill.

You could have some sort of recognition that the bill has been inserted using a light or ultrasonic sensor, that would start rollers and suck in a bill onto a scanning platform.

You would then need to recognize the denomination of the bill. This would typically be done with a camera and sophisticated pattern recognition software.

You might possibly be able to scan the bill slowly with a color sensor and use some rough heuristics to guess what denomination it is. To use a camera, you would either need to have a PC-connected web cam, or you might possibly be able to use a NXTCam v3 with custom firmware. As as said before, accurate recognition including not being fooled by counterfeit money is an extremely difficult problem.

You would then need to move the money off the scanning platform into a bin, possibly with rollers or a flipper mechanism.

Counting coins is a completely different problem, and is likely to involve weighing them and possibly measuring their size. If you wanted complete accuracy, you would probably have to scan them with a camera and do visual identification, similar to what is needed for the bills.