A item made the rounds on the maker media about a DIY self-ordering sales kiosk. This was for actually selling stuff. That did not seem nearly ambitious enough, and possessing an old tablet and knowledge of receipt printers, I knew I had to make something much more ridiculous.

The BougieVend is one of those project that starts out as “I can knock this out in a couple weeks” (don’t they all) and turns out to be considerably more effort.

Thanks to AI, creating the graphics for the interface was doable and rather fun once I made up my list of things you would never actually  buy at at a self-ordering kiosk.

The brick wall was doing the programming in App Inventor (the only Android programming environment I have experience with) and getting it to work with the receipt printer. I think visual block programing is a really bad idea all around. If someone is old enough to read they will be much more efficient with text programming and all the shapes and bright colors just make it harder to fit code on screen, keep track of it, and nearly impossible to copy it. But I struggled through, wishing for Python.

I originally planned to have the tablet connected to the printer over the OTG USB cable. After a week of banging my head against a wall trying to get it to work I had to develop a plan B using a BLE connection, which worked once I got a different, and bigger, printer. Fortunately I have a use for the first one.

I also imagined building this all into a kiosk or point-of-sale terminal. However just holding the tablet with the printer next to it worked fine and was easier to transport and store.

The user enters their name and makes a series of selections on the tablet. They print out the receipt that lists everything they bought along with a lengthy series of up charges. People like to run their receipts into the billions and take them to boast to others. Of course there is always one in a crowd that just buys a single blade of grass because they don’t want to spend too much.

I discovered something interesting when showing this. If the tablet is just laying on the table along with other maker gadgets people invariably pass over it without paying attention. I tried putting it on a small temporary stand and suddenly people were interested in it. I don’t think I will go the full kiosk route but clearly I need to get it up off the table and more into the attention zone for future shows.