We always knew that McDonald’s soft serve (you can’t really call it ice cream) machines are known to be finicky. There’s even a website that tracks where the machines are broken and, apparently, it is usually about 10% or more of them at any given time. But when we saw a news article about a judge issuing a restraining order, we knew there must be more to the story. Turns out, these $18,000 soft serve machines are in the heart of something we are very interested in: when do you own your own technology?

Cold Tech

There are apparently 13,000 or so of these machines and they are supposedly high-tech marvels, able to produce soft serve and milkshakes at the same time. However, they are also high maintenance. Cleaning the machine every two weeks (try not to think about that) involves a complete teardown. Worse, if anything breaks, you need a factory-authorized service person.

At the heart of this is a secret menu that requires an undocumented set of keypresses to enter. We’ve seen that before, of course, and apparently, it isn’t that secret, since a quick search found the exact sequence required in their service manual from the manufacturer (Taylor). However, a third-party company developed a box called Kytch that intercepts data from inside the Taylor machine and presents it on WiFi including all the secret service data. Their website proudly proclaims it is a Raspberry Pi that you install inside the machine and somehow connects to an internal bus to monitor the machine’s operation. The add-on aims to make it easier to track what’s going on with the machine, and that includes keeping it in working order.

So?

Hackaday readers won’t find that whole concept very odd. We do this sort of thing all the time and the only reason we probably haven’t seen this on the tip line is the surprising lack of soft serve machines inside hackerspaces. But we’ve seen the same idea for washing machines and plenty of other gear.

The problem here is that Taylor and McDonald’s have been unhappy that restaurant operators are using the device. Kytch, who make the add-on box, are unhappy that Taylor has tried to acquire their device which contravenes the Kytch license agreement with its users and filed a lawsuit about it back in May (PDF). So there would seem to be plenty of lawyers involved.

Ironically, the founders of Kytch started by fixing the Taylor machines to combat problems in integrating the machines with their frozen yogurt robot, an endeavor supported by Taylor. They did decline to share the internal protocols of their machines with them, but otherwise were cooperative with the team and clearly knew they were thinking of closer integration between the two machines.

The Winner Is?

We don’t know which way the courts will finally resolve this issue. On the one hand, we are big fans of being able to hack equipment you own, especially machines that cost $18,000, break often (resulting …read more

Source:: Hackaday