Patent ID: 7850257

Claim:
A ticket dispenser for pre-printed lottery tickets, comprising: a plurality of arrays of pre-printed scratch-off lottery tickets in strips with individual tickets being delineated from one another in an array by lines of weakness; a housing having a bottom support structure, a pair of side walls extending upwardly from said bottom support structure, a front wall hinged adjacent its bottom edge to said bottom support structure at a first side so as to swing outwardly and downwardly, a cover hinged to said bottom support structure at a side opposite said first side and shaped to cover said bottom support structure with space between said bottom support structure and said cover, said space containing the plurality of arrays of tickets; and a powered drive module inside said housing, said drive module being positioned adjacent said front wall, the drive module positioned and configured to receive strips of tickets from said arrays, said module containing a drive mechanism configured to, responsive to a command to dispense a requested quantity of tickets from a selected one of said arrays, to dispense the requested quantity of tickets from the selected one of said arrays, said drive module further including a powered separator configured to separate tickets from the selected one of said arrays prior to the tickets being dispensed from the ticket dispenser, wherein said drive module comprises a drive module housing, which forms an enclosure, having at least one inlet opening for admitting plural parallel ticket strips into said enclosure, at least one outlet opening for issuing tickets from one of said strips, a drive motor driving a drive shaft, a plurality of input drive rollers rotatably mounted on a common shaft, and a selectively operable transmission configured to selectively couple said input drive rollers to said drive shaft for selectively feeding tickets in one of said strips through said module and out through said outlet opening.