I’m curious to see what these machines look like on the inside. I’m imagining a spindle that rotates, with a robot arm that retrieves/returns DVDs. Plus a barcode scanner?
Do they have little air conditioners inside them? I hear a lot going on in the machines.
A short Youtube video: What’s Inside a redbox DVD rental kiosk
You can see a little bit, but no step-by-step explanation there.
Interesting, the “arm” only moves up and down, not side to side. The disc holder rotates. I had imagined a fixed holder and a 2-d arm.
There is presumably a scanning system near the opening to read the bar codes found near the center of the discs to verify return.
I also presume that the kiosk communicates with HQ using cell phone networks. Outside locations and such would make wired systems tricky.
Now if only someone would explain why the diagram for swiping your card misleads you into swiping on the wrong side. (Mrs. FtG and I got stuck on this early on and we’ve seen several people just give up and walk away when their cards didn’t take.)
(There was an episode of South Park last season that showed some kids breaking into a Redbox to steal the money inside. Um, what money? There is no cash accepted. They need a credit card to bill in case you don’t return the disc.)
I can tell you from first hand experience that a working Redbox card reader does not require a specific card orientation–the card can be facing left or right, and you can swipe it either upwards or downwards. Some machines just have bad or dirty readers that have problems reading some cards. It appears that they replace or clean the bad ones occasionally which brings their read success rate back to normal.
It looks pretty much the same as a tape silo. Eons ago we bought a Quantum tape silo that held 120 DLT tapes, and it worked in almost exactly the same manner. However an interesting trick it pulled was that the bar codes were scanned by the rotation of the spindle with the laser and sensor mounted on the robot arm staying fixed. This is possible as the tapes were stored horizontally in the spindle. It would not surprise me if these DVD systems are build by the same engineers that designed tape silos. (We paid $80,000 for the silo, and it held a grand total of 1.2TB. Operationally it was one of the best things we ever bought.)
Air-conditioning the Redbox systems would probably be a bad idea. Unless you could manage quite tight temperature and humidity control it is better to let everything equalise with ambient. Otherwise you create potential dew issues. Condensation will kill things much faster than heat.