Anyone have any experience with this device? Anyone have a driver for sale?
Any comments on how hard a driver would be to write?
Thanks,
Kevin
I don’t have experience with that particular model, but I do have experience
with an American Magnetics model which is very similar. They both use an
RS-232 port for communication, so you don’t really need a “device driver”
per se… You just talk to it at 4800,7,odd,1 and send it “messages” to
tell it what you want it to do. A message is a packet of characters,
starting with an (Ctrl-B), then some data representing what you want
to do, then an (Ctrl-C) and an optional checksum or block check
character (BCC). Pretty simple, really. You just need to supply the
program that reads the database or accepts user input or whatever, and then
spits out the messages that encode the cards.
The tech specs for the MT-85 can be found at:
http://www.magtek.com/public/techdocs/75107-2.pdf
A word of warning for you, cards encoded by hand-swiping through this type
of device do mostly work, but depending on how consistantly they’re swiped
when you encode them, they may or may not be more problematic at any given
reader out in the field. We switched to a Datacard automatic
encoder/embosser (when we began encoding cards in earnest) and achieved much
better results than we ever did with the hand-swiping, however those suckers
are in the $50,000 range so it’s not a trivial matter to “upgrade”…
-Warren “yes, I made my own credit cards (sorta)” Peece
“Kevin Miller” <kevin.miller@transcore.com> wrote in message
news:9743ts$go2$1@inn.qnx.com…
Anyone have any experience with this device? Anyone have a driver for
sale?
Any comments on how hard a driver would be to write?Thanks,
Kevin
Any estimate, even very rough, of what the failure-to-read rate might be
given a random selection of untrained people doing the swiping for read and
write?
Thanks,
Kevin
Warren Peece <warren@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:974ku5$pjm$1@inn.qnx.com…
I don’t have experience with that particular model, but I do have
experience
with an American Magnetics model which is very similar. They both use an
RS-232 port for communication, so you don’t really need a “device driver”
per se… You just talk to it at 4800,7,odd,1 and send it “messages” to
tell it what you want it to do. A message is a packet of characters,
starting with an (Ctrl-B), then some data representing what you want
to do, then an (Ctrl-C) and an optional checksum or block check
character (BCC). Pretty simple, really. You just need to supply the
program that reads the database or accepts user input or whatever, and
then
spits out the messages that encode the cards.The tech specs for the MT-85 can be found at:
http://www.magtek.com/public/techdocs/75107-2.pdfA word of warning for you, cards encoded by hand-swiping through this type
of device do mostly work, but depending on how consistantly they’re swiped
when you encode them, they may or may not be more problematic at any given
reader out in the field. We switched to a Datacard automatic
encoder/embosser (when we began encoding cards in earnest) and achieved
much
better results than we ever did with the hand-swiping, however those
suckers
are in the $50,000 range so it’s not a trivial matter to “upgrade”…-Warren “yes, I made my own credit cards (sorta)” Peece
“Kevin Miller” <> kevin.miller@transcore.com> > wrote in message
news:9743ts$go2$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
Anyone have any experience with this device? Anyone have a driver for
sale?
Any comments on how hard a driver would be to write?Thanks,
Kevin
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