USBIOC Pulsar

The USBIOC is a universal USB IO Controller.

The Pulsar version of the product can be used to give a payment pulse from a computer, android tablet or similar (with USB interface) to a gaming vending machine. The device comes prewired to support simulation of the usual Arcade Gaming Coin acceptors.

The device talks USB 2.0 and to the host identifies as an ACM device, so most operating systems enumerate and support the device driverless.

In Windows, you will find it as a 'COMx' port.

In linux, android, raspbian, if you have installed usb serial and ACM drivers (which are usually installed default) it will show up as /dev/ttyACM0 or with a higher number if you have multiple ACM devices plugged in.

The use of the device is trivial. You can open the serial port and just echo/send a command string to the device. It will also answer to some commands, for example, to check the version, but for most applications, just sending a command to generate a pulse is enough.

Commands are generally terminated by the end-of-line sequence (CR, CR/LF or just LF on linux, the device accepts all)

Here is a list of commands:

V - this command interrogates the device version

Px,yy - this command will output the payment pulse. In the standard device, only one IO is supported, and the default pulse length for most coin acceptors is 50ms, so the correct command would in most applications P1,50

For development versions, to test the machine side, a push button could be connected with the device. If you have such a device, pressing the pushbutton will also issue a 50ms Pulse (so you do not need to write software to test on the arcade machine). However, note, the USBIOC still needs a USB connection to receive power.