Arduino project: LCD+RFID ticket machine.

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello!

I am new here and I am new to Arduino as well.. Acually I newer saw any of them in my life before. I am learning as programmer in college and now I need to do my 'qualification work'. That's must be some kind of programming project. I like electronics as well so I come up with idea to create public transportation ticket selling machine using arduino and shields from ebay/china.

My idea is to have LCD color display (saw such on ebay, 7" could be a beautifull choice), have at least four physical button for input/navigation (that's optional, LCD touch could be used instead, I just noted that real machines trend to use physical buttons rather than touch cause they ar thought and easy to replace in case of failure), use some cheap coin-acceptor (saw them on ebay also) and RFID card reader/writer (saw them as well on ebay for arduino).

So basically user selects desired transportation type/ticket quantity, put required ammount of coins in acceptor and tickets is being saved on users RFID card. User can also check ticket balance on hes RFID card. Or select different display language (optional). RFID cards serves as multi-use/personalised tickets.
I really love this idea because such a deviceas are there out for real, but a little bit more serious.

My questions is:

  1. is this even possible with arduino, will it work?
  2. If so - Which arduino board do you recommend me to use?
  3. Any hardware releated recommendations(for example don't use 7", use thos 3,2" screens)?

I noticed that this LCD uses a lot of IO pins. Will there be enought for the rest of my hardware - Coin-acceptor and RFID and buttons?!

2

You are on the right track with your observation that the LCD screen uses a lot of pins. You need to break your project down into the various components and then have a look at how you would get each bit working, including how many pins are required. I would also look at whether there are libraries or examples readily available for each component if you are new to Arduino and electronics. It will make your life much easier.

You can get different Arduino boards with different numbers of pins available. If you have a look at the Mega, it has 54 IO pins. You can also use things like shift registers to increase the number of pins available.

In short, it sounds doable.

3

Don't be put off by the number of I/O pins you need, it is very easy to add extra I/O to an almost unlimited number. What is important is the memory, especially for adding a large LCD display ( 7" is large ).
So start by looking at the display and what it needs to interface to it. That is the weak part of your plan, the rest is reasonable, if you put in the background work.

4

Thanks all for replies. I found Nextion HMI TFT LCD with touch as a great component for my project. It perfectly suits my needs and uses only two wires to communicate to my arduino via serial uart.