Smart Vending & Self-Service

Smart vending and self-service machines fail in ways that lose revenue quietly: a stuck payment terminal, a crashed control app, or a stockout no one noticed. Most sit on a mobile connection with no public address. ThinRemote surfaces machine health continuously and gives you a shell into the device even behind a carrier NAT.

The problem

A machine that stops taking payments earns nothing until someone visits, and by the time a route driver notices, the outage has run for days. Cellular NAT makes the machine unreachable from outside. Sending a technician just to read a log or restart a service does not pay for itself.

How ThinRemote fits

• Track health with monitoring metrics and raise alarms on payment faults or stockouts, so you hear about problems before customers do. See monitoring and alarms.
• Publish a machine-specific signal (bill validator status, coin level) as a custom resource the dashboard can read:

thinr device resource vendor-4471 stock-report

• SSH into the controller over its cellular link to restart a crashed app:

thinr device console vendor-4471

• Check the payment daemon without an interactive session:

thinr device exec vendor-4471 "systemctl status payment-agent" --json

At fleet scale

Define the metric once on the product so every machine reports the same health signals, then poll the whole fleet's status at a glance:

thinr product status vending-fleet -w

Related

• Monitoring and alarms
• Custom scripts
• SSH and console
• Exec commands
• Products and groups