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I doubt these machines are internet-connected. Most likely is that the store manager notices the machine has gone into its cleaning cycle and manually marks the item on the menu as unavailable.

You could have a cesium time source in the thing but if the service tech or manager sets it wrong...you're still borked.

But exactly the same borked each and every day!

Or a G Shock with radio based time correction is $90. Not saying you could use the watch, but maybe the receiver is available.

And use some computer vision on the raspberry pi to read off the time? I love it! This is why they don’t let me work on hardware.

Can you provide some information as to how I could do a cheap GPS setup for a non GPS iPad in a similar manner?

I think you can do TTL serial on the headphone jack? Just hook a uBlox module up there (or use Bluetooth)