We went the UNO route with our current testing & will soon to proceed to update the controls on all of our 32 laundromat commercial washing machines. A word of caution ... it helps to get familiar with Finite State Machine Skills within the UNO ... C & C++. We successfully tested 100% in a garage like back room. Then pretty much identical setup on our washing machine bulk head the PCB turned out to develop electrical noise problems. We also had to eventually buy noise filtering dual 5V & 12V power supplies ... everything in 32+ quantities of course.
We then had to special order about 40 of the industrial duty UNO
www.ruggedcircuits.com screw terminal boards because our UNO & MEGA prototype boards had a too vulnerable of terminal surface mount internal solder technicality. Live & learn! It seems like it has been about 12 weeks of trouble free use on a machine in the actual environment so hopefully we will be good to go along with dollar
coin acceptance on all the formerly
coin slide machines by hopefully May or June ... we will find out once we get rolling doing hopefully 3 or 4 a week at some point. Some things could be done real low cost with RS485 daisy chaining all 32 pieces of equipment as a future upgrade ... not sure if I will go that route. Gee whiz ... would that mean that all 32 of my washers would be compatible with IoT Smartthings or similar???
I did invest some serious time with Fiverr programmers but never did actually sign a contract with them because of a variety of uncertainties they held out on their side.
Maybe someday I will order a Raspberry Pi with its ethernet or add a wifi for 24/7 monitoring-control use ... considering almost no wattage to run it. Right now it might be out of my range programming wise ... not 100% sure either way. Plus considering the extreme capabilities of a Raspberry Pi it might be overkill.
