From Coins to FSMs: A User-Centric Vending Machine Design With Interactive UI

A vending machine (VM) is a self-service device that dispenses items like snacks, beverages, medicines, or other products when money or a card is inserted, and a selection is made. Vending machines have a wide range of applications in today’s world in every shop and public place for selling or dispensing most frequently purchased items and to meet the needs of the crowd. In this paper, we have implemented a vending machine that offers five different snacks, price ranging from Rs.5 to Rs.25. The concept of finite state machine is used here to carry out each task. The paper has also presented the working of our vending machine with Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) implementation and visualization in User Interface (UI) using HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript and the code for the same can be found in the GitHub account.