Money counting machine

[burgic]

Hello everyone,

As I am new here I would like to share a new project I will work on in the following weeks/months (depending on the free time since this is a hobby project).
The project itself should be pretty simple but with reserved space for improvements if necessary in the future - coin acceptor with an LCD (or similar) display showing how much money is inserted. Nothing fancy, w/o HW protection and w/o robust SW (as we usual have with money control machines) as I build this device for a gift.

I decided to make a dedicated PCB even though I could use one of previous ones with some coin acceptors supported.
I am planning to work with Comestero RM5 since I have one at home, but also to support RM5HD (with ccTalk) and cheap Chinese ones.
Any suggestion regarding coin acceptors which are popular nowadays is welcome. At least I can add an additional connector on the PCB for the future.

For the first phase I am planning to use a typical 16x2 or 20x4 LCD, but I am also considering to use Nokia 5110 LCD. Any opinion on this is also welcome, since I never worked with any other LCD than 16x2 and 20x4.
uC used will be something from STM32F1xx series since I have a lot of the libraries and code written already.
CLI is also a part of the first phase, as the device shall provide a configuration interface to enable/disable built-in features.

If there is a time and need, second stage shall support in SW ccTalk protocol, probably not fully but basic commands.

Compiler and tools in general: gcc-arm-none-eabi, cmake, KiCad, Git, Clone5.

Please feel free to add suggestions, comments, critics and/or similar.

Cheers!