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med-O-mat in English

med-O-mat is a kit for building a honey vending machine for small beekeepers. Customers pay with their own phone, type a pickup code on the keypad and take the jar themselves. The beekeeper only refills the jars.

Apart from this page and the buying guide, the website is in Czech, and so is the shop.

Standing at a med-O-mat?

Read the step-by-step guide to buying honey. It is also available in German and Polish.

Whether it’s the payment, the pickup code, honey, jars or a faulty machine, contact whoever runs the machine. They sell the honey, and it is usually a local beekeeper. Their phone number is shown at the bottom of the machine’s start screen (“If problem call:” on an English display) and, when dispensing fails, also on the screen that says something went wrong.

How the machine works

  • No internet connection needed. The machine runs offline. The customer pays from their own phone, with a banking app or a bitcoin wallet.
  • Two ways to pay: a QR bank payment (Czech QR payment standard) or bitcoin over the Lightning network. The machine doesn’t take cards or cash.
  • No money inside. The machine releases a jar only after a 6-digit pickup code has been entered on the keypad.
  • Protected payment details. The payment details from the machine are protected against forgery and tampering, and the machine checks the pickup code itself, so it never has to be online.
  • Modular. One control board runs 1 to 8 dispensing modules, and each module holds up to 7 jars.
  • Four display languages: Czech, English, German and Polish.
  • Low-stock alerts. The machine tells the owner when jars are running low.

The kit

med-O-mat comes as a kit that you assemble following the build guide, which you get with the kit. The machine’s plans (hardware) and firmware are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which permits their use for non-commercial purposes only; the plans are not published yet. A commercial licence is available on request.

The shop, the product pages and the build guide are in Czech. An overview of what assembly involves is on the assembly page (in Czech).

Contact

Questions about the kit: email chcimed-o-mat.cz. The main website is in Czech.