This is firmware for AVR microcontrollers with SPI and a UART to intercept the CH-926 coin acceptor's communication with its 7-segment display and write non-zero numbers to the UART.
If you put coins into the CH-926 in rapid succession, it is impossible to know which coin a pulse belongs to (so two pulses might be one coin with two pulses or two coins with one pulse).
Because of this, the number of pulses has to be proportional to the value of the coin. Using everything from 5 cents to 2 Euro coins means that the 5 cent coin has one pulse and the 2 Euro coin 40 - but every pulse needs 130 milliseconds, so this will take over 5 seconds to read!
The device also flashes the number of pulses on a 7-segment display. Reading this display is much faster than waiting for the pulses, and you don't need to make the coin pulses proportional to their value.
The 7-segment display is controlled through a shift register, which gets its values from the CH-926's microcontroller through SPI. We simply attach our own microcontroller to the SPI bus and listen to the communication. After we've decoded the digits, we write them to the UART. After that we sleep for a few microseconds so we don't read any numbers twice - the display gets the same signal three times in a row, and you wouldn't want to end up with only a third of the money at the end of the day :)
Flash the firmware to e.g. an ATMega8 (making sure to set it to run on its own internal oscillator, and that your CPU frequency's set correctly), connect its SPI pins to the shift register's inputs, and connect its UART's TX pin to where you need it. In our coin acceptor we cut the trace of the now useless signal wire that used to output the pulses and put the UART signal in its place instead. You could even output everything with a bluetooth module.
A DIP ATMega8 fits into the CH-926's case rather easily, and runs on the same voltage (5V), so you can have everything looking the same as before, but with much nicer outputs :)
TODO: Document the SPI pins on the shift register properly.