In an effort to automatically put all of my dwarfs through coinstar training, I set up a coinstar operation in a statue garden, with the bridge connected to a repeater.
After a few minutes, it seemed to be going well. Multiple idle dwarves were hanging out in the coinstar, being pelted with coins. Each time the coinstar fires, only one dwarf in each square actually gets hit, so only two dwarves get the benefit of the training at a time, but it still seemed promising that over the course of months or years this would result in a substantial boost to the stats of my dwarves. Nonetheless, I was worried that eventually someone would drop something inappropriate in there.
It took a few days, but they did. It seems someone discarded a cloth hat and glove in there. Shortly thereafter, one of my top weaponsmiths caught a cap to the gut, and took a minor, but real, injury. I've shut this back down until I figure out if there's a way around this.
I'm having trouble thinking of a way to prevent dwarves from littering various potentially deadly objects into an unattended automated coinstar. I'm just glad that it was a cloth cap, and not a barrel of dwarven ale, or a steel breastplate or the like. It seems like a retracting bridge based model is always going to have the possibility of accumulating other larger, more deadly items. Something involving a minecart that dwarves load by hand could ensure collecting only appropriate items, but would turn into a huge sink of dwarfpower, and presumably operate much more slowly. Anyone have an idea for how to safely run this unsupervised without requiring dwarves to individually haul each coin?