Sadly the distributions I tried did not open the required port(s) on the built-in firewall (Bazzite and CachyOS, for two).

I would suggest to disable any firewall and check if you can pair.

While I have no idea how much a computerized vending machine costs, I found this article about a age/gender classifier that runs on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Looking at the machine’s big touchscreen, I think this classifier would fit on the SBC or require a relatively small upgrade.

My guess is to associate which product is best selling to which demographic to better target them.

So ingenious 🤮