COVendor

The Problem

A special hotel located on an army base (The Inn at Schofield Barracks) had a very special problem..  They had a couple of coin operated laundry rooms on their premises for their guests to use.  It made sense since the average stay of a guest (and often family including kids) was 3 weeks and quite often more.  Problem was their guests didn't have the cash because they had already spent their money on the move to the new army posting and were not going to get money from the army for at least 10 days.  So they had egger customers who didn't have the cash handy but would soon enough.  At the same time there was a problem with "skimming" of the cash from staff.

The Solution

We setup a system whereby the magnetic stripe key that was used by guests to open their room doors was in addition to the key information also encoded with their folio (hotel account) number.  A magnetic card terminal, not unlike the one's at the grocery store, was setup in each laundry room and vending machines distributed throughout the property.  A serial to Ethernet bridge connected these terminals to a host computer.  A guest would swipe his/her card in the terminal.  The terminal relayed the information to the host computer which then interfaced with the Property Management System and authorized that the card was valid.  The host then asked the terminal to display a prompt to the guest to ask which machine he/she wished to activate.  Once the guest entered the machine number the host computer relayed a signal to the machine (again via the Ethernet to serial bridge) and interfaced with the Property Management System to post the transaction.  When the guest paid the hotel the charge would show up as a line item on the bill.  The convenience of this system not only captured lost revenue and opportunity but it actually helped increase use of the facilities and showed that an increase in the facilities capacity was required.

The Technical Details

For the laundry side of things we used a MR350TA from Unitech and programmed it to communicate with a Windows based machine over a serial connection for a card swipe terminal.  However the terminals and the computer are not only located in different rooms but actually different buildings.  Thus a direct serial connection was not possible and a RocketPort Serial Hub from Comtrol was used.  The Windows based computer received input from the wall mounted terminal and used the data to format an SQL query that was then submitted to the Property Management Server's (PMS) SQL database.  The PMS database was designed by Hotel Information Systems.  If the information received from the user was valid and the card was valid as verified by the SQL Query then a signal was sent via a different serial port over Ethernet to a custom built device.  The custom built device uses a microcontroller by Z-World.  We programmed the microcontroller to interpret the signal and to then produce a precise TTL signal that simulated a coin drop within the controller board of the Maytag machine (Model similar to MAT12PS).  The Windows computer would then record the transaction in its own SQL database.

The new generation of this product uses the same card terminal and software but the costom built device using the Z-Word microcontroler we used the Digi Connect ME with a customize board.

For the vending machines we used a OVCU unit from Shlumberger/Danyl that fits into most modern vending machines and is able to communicate with a central computer over a shared 2 wire RS485 bus.  The vending machine interface follows the same logic as the laundry machines in terms of authorization and recording.

Once the transactions are recorded another piece of software that monitors the database for recorded transactions takes the transaction and posts it to PMS database via a serial connection using a industry standard protocol.  The only reason for using the serial communication is because the PMS software only supports this type of interface.  We of course would have custom designed any interface via any method that was required.  Finally during their nightly audit the clerks access a report via an intranet web-site.  The report can be manipulated to display different data in different ways.