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I’ve been designing a fully 3D-printable vending machine—about 340mm tall and 215mm wide—built to offer small, thin items like stickers, cards, or handmade trinkets. I’m not really sure why I built this. There is a whole story about trying and failing to find a tabletop vending machine that accepts digital payments, and that looks nice, but in the end I think I really just wanted to build a vending machine.... Vending machines are cool. Also I've been interested in integrating web based controls into electronics projects for a while, and when I suddenly had a small need in my life for a mini vending machine, the whole image of this machine came together in my mind, with the QR code to make a shelf selection, pay with venmo, clean minimalist design. So I just started working on it.

The goals for the project:

  • Able to reliably vend various small items - stickers, jewlery, pins, teabags, small snacks, etc
  • Able to fit 6 vending shelves for 6 different item types.
  • Able to fit at least a few of each product at a time on each shelf.
  • Loading the product could not be difficult or time consuming.
  • Must accept Venmo payments and vend immediatly upon payment.
  • Must be cheaper than $100 to make.
  • Must be cute. That is most of the value in a thing like this anyways.

Things I didn't prioritize so much:

  • Security. It's made of plastic, so it isn't really meant to be put in rough places with no supervision.

I'm hoping that I can make it fairly customizable, maybe with themed vinyl wraps and made to order shelf sizes, and adaptable for different settings—whether that’s a gallery, a pop-up shop, or even part of a game or interactive exhibit.

I’ll keep updating this page as the design evolves. If you're working on something similar, or could use something like this in your own project, I’d love to connect.

Updates

8/1/2025

I just finiished the 3rd prototype machine, replacing the printed coils with a new bolt and screw vending mechanism. But I'm also just getting this website up and running so I'll do a bit of a retrospective on my last 6 months of working on this.

It’s been quite a bit harder than I thought it would be at the outset... for these reasons:

  • The payment API. Accepting instant Venmo payments was a key goal of this project, and the API docs were overwhelming and unorganized. I got there in the end, but man it was one of the worst integration experiences I’ve had in a while.

  • 3D printed coils are not ideal. The prints fail often, and the results are not smooth enough to work as a vending mechanism for most materials. I really learned how far I can push my printer's ability to print unsupported overhangs on this project, and honestly it was surprising how much it could handle. But the quality just wasn't high enough to work, and the coils sucked to work with.

  • How do you make something that can deal with a variety of different product types? Awkwardly shaped, top heavy, side heavy, skinny, long, heavy, I mean I know its 3D printed, but I wanted this to be able to do more than just stickers. This problem is inextricably linked to the coil problem, and it was by far the source of most of the stress of this project. The current bolt-and-screw design with “vending frames” is the result of that stress.

That said, a lot of this project has gone surprisingly smoothly. The fall detection using break-beam sensors has been super reliable—it almost never misses a drop. I also haven’t run into any real issues on the power or electronics side, which is a nice change. I come from a software background, so usually these kinds of projects teach me a hard-earned lesson or two in electronics. This time, things just worked.

I’m still working on fleshing out the UI for this and I plan on adding a backend portal soon for machine managers to easily update their machines settings and see sales data.