Vending Machine (MDB) interface

INTRODUCTION

Vending Machines have been in the market for more that 50 years with a current market size of almost $20 billion US dollars. More than 70% of vending machines are still based on legacy technologies from the early 1990s as is the Multy-Drop Bus protocol (MDB).

Lately, this technology was complemented with adhoc gateways that provides more features and payments types. Payment with crypto still in an early state of adoption with a great potential. Taking the lead in this industry will be a major milestone for the Cardano ecosystem.

This proposal is to build an interface that integrates ADA Pay with an MDB gateway composed of a Raspberry Pi with an MDB hat interface. This project will open huge possibilities to deploy payments with ADA on traditional vending machines and position Cardano and COTI on that market.

PROJECT PLAN

This project consist on the development of the MDB interface for ADA Pay that involves the following activities:

• Deploy a development environment: MDB simulator + MDB gateway composed of a Raspberry Pi with an MDB hat
• Get and interiorize in COTI ADA Pay API
• Develop a payment interface for the MDB gateway
• Integrate ADA Pay API into the interface
• Test interface
• Demo

The project duration is estimated in SIX WEEKS with the following breakdown:

• one week for environment setup and API understanding
• two weeks of plugin development
• two weeks of API integration
• one week of testing and demo

BUDGET

The budget consists primarily of development hour costs plus the development environment setup. Budget breakdown is as follow:

• Raspberry Pi: USD 100
• MDB Hat: USD 200
• Interface development (60 hours at $100/hr): USD 6,000
• ADA Pay API integration (70 hourss at $100/hr): USD 7,000
• testing and demo (30 hours at $100/hr): USD 3,000

TOTAL BUDGET: USD 16,300

PROJECT TRACKING

The project implementation will follow Agile management based on Jira Cloud tools. Jira users can be created for follow up and auditability. Additionally, a bi-weekly report will be published with project progress, major milestones and risk assessment.

The plugin is the main deliverables that constitute the metric of progress and success:

Intermediate progress will be reported as Spring Burndown, a KPI metric that shows the progress of each development sprint. Additionally, the development will be managed in a public github repository where periodic commits will be pushed and that allow the community to audit and validate the work.

We've determined the following KPIs:

• Environment setup Sprint Burndown
• Interface development Sprint Burndown
• ADA Pay integration Sprint Burndown
• Testing Sprint Burndown

RISK ASSESSMENT

There is an intrinsic risk due to the fact that ADA Pay API is not known at time of developing this proposal. We have assumed that API integration won't deviate from traditional integration and process. However, if something deviates from the plan, we will use part of the budget to acquire the expertise needed to cope with the challenge.

TEAM AND EXPERIENCE

This proposal was elaborated by Rodolfo Miranda. His Linkedin profile can be find at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodolfomiranda/

His background includes a MS EE degree at Stanford University and more than 25 years of successful work experience in both large multinational companies and owned startup projects. His main activities involve architecting, developing, and implementing large scale software solutions for the Telecommunication Industry. He leads multi-disciplinary and multinational teams in the Caribbean and Latin America.

More than 40 years of self-taught programming with advanced knowledge on many coding languages. Lately, he was engaged in blockchain technologies and joined Cardano community where he:

• Submitted and received funding for his proposal in Fund 6: https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Interoperability-as-growth-driver/368705-48088
• Delivered a DIF side-tree implementation on top of Cardano: https://github.com/rodolfomiranda/sidetree-cardano
• Participated as Community Advisor in Fund 6
• Is one of the members of the Challenge Team for Fund 7 challenge "Grow Latinamerica, Grow Cardano"
• Is part of the first cohort of the Atala Prism Pioneer Program

He participated in previous projects that involved MDB interfaces and payment adaptations such as cashless devices. For this project, a developer with advanced knowledge on MDB interfaces will participate in the development.