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Monday, August 27, 2007

Hacking' Coca Cola machines.

This will be a brief tutorial on hacking, if you can call it that, coca cola machines.

First off, the vending machines that you can do this on : Coke, Coca-Cola classic, Diet Coke/Coke light, Sprite, Dasani, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Fanta, Fresca, and any other products made by coke in the US, those are the ones I know of in the UK.

Pictures of the kind of machines this works on: This

Before you attempt this you might want to make sure that the machine your targeting has an LCD display saying something along the lines of "refreshing beverages", if not, your out of luck. Most of the newer vending machines will have this on.

Getting into the menu.

The buttons to select which drink you will be purchasing are all numbered, depending on how they are positioned. If they are vertical they will be numbered as follows -

[ 1 ]
[ 2 ]
[ 3 ]
[ 4 ]

However, If they are positioned horizontal they will be numbered like this -

[ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ]
[ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ][ 8 ]

And so on and so forth. The sequence used to get into the debug menu is [ 4 ][ 2 ][ 3 ][ 1 ]

Now you should notice that the debug menu says "Error", If this isn't the case, your target machine doesn't have a debug menu.

The debug menu

Once you are in the debug menu there is a number of options you have. We will discuss them soon.

Navigating the debug menu is relatively simple, the buttons are as follows -

[ 1 ] = Back
[ 2 ] = Up
[ 3 ] = Down
[ 4 ] = Select

Now to the options we have ;). On the debug menu there are CASH, SALE, VER, ERORR, and RTN.

Cash - Machine Sales
With this option we can view all the sales made by the machine and how much money has been made off each individual item. There are 10 or so different options available in here, I'm not too sure what they are but If someone else can post about it, that would be great.

Sale - Total Sale Count
The sale option displays how many beverages have been purchased from this machine. Not much we can do with this.

Ver - Machine Version (I believe.)
Selecting this option will make a pretty large combination of numbers and letters scroll across the LCD display. I'm not sure how many characters, I think it's 12 though.

Erorr - Error Log
Pretty straight forward, the error log of the machine. Column Jams, Vend, Char, Acce, door, bvall (sp?). And I think that's it, there isn't much you can do with this although if you press and hold button 4 for a few seconds, it will clear all logs.

Rtn - Exit.
Exit's the debug menu.

Now to the fun part

CPO - Coin Pay Out *
Selecting this option will allow you to get coins from the mechanism which you use to put money in to the machine. There are options with-in CPO that allows you to select which coins you want to dump. I've only ever found 2 machines with this option, 1 had £0 in it -_- and when I was browsing the other one the security guard came so I had to leave (Was in a mall :P).

Press select button 4 to enter mode and the lowest coin value dispensable will show on the display.
Press select button 2 or 3 to scroll through the different coin values available.
Press and hold select button 4 to dump the coins whose value is shown on the display.
Press select button 1 will return to "CPO".
Press select button 2 to scroll to the next routine.

PrIC - Change prices of drinks *
I've never used this section but I'd assume you would select the drink by navigating up and down, then select it, then change the price with the navigation buttons. Someone please correct me if they know otherwise.

Pass - Change the password *
I've never found a machine where this option is accessible but it allows you to change the pass from [ 4 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 1 ]. .

Rely - Relay (I think.) *
I'd advise you not to try this one, unless your a malicious little bugger :P. Selecting this option will usually cause the machine to jam and become unresponsive.

Time - Change the machines time *
Allows you to set the machines time.

CCo - Correct Change Only *
Change whether or not the machine will only accept correct change.

Note: * = May not be available, If the person who operates the machine has it turned off for safety purposes.

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