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There are magnetic stripe readers everywhere -- I can't imagine they're that hard or expensive to produce.
by chasing 11y ago
There are magnetic stripe readers everywhere -- I can't imagine they're that hard or expensive to produce.
- therein 11y agoI don't imagine they are as straightforward as buying a magnetic reader and putting it in a shell. The interface is somewhat unique after all. It connects through the audio jack. The processing on the software side need to be somewhat custom as well.
- Johnie 11y agoYup, it's as simple as putting a magnetic stripe reader and putting it into a shell. These are a commodity on Alibaba now [1]. The idea of using headphone jack for data transfer has been around since the Commodore PCs [2] The software side is pretty standard too [3]. It's a standard analog to digital conversion. [1] http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/headphone-jack-magnetic-card-reader.html http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/headphone-jack-magnetic-card... [2] http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/crossplatform/transfer/transfer.html#wire-tape-audio http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/crossplatform/transfe... And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette [3] http://www.slideshare.net/ShipengXu/data-transmission-through-audio-jack-on-ios http://www.slideshare.net/ShipengXu/data-transmission-throug...
- nathancahill 11y agoYeah, a buddy of mine built on from parts at a hackathon on a weekend. Really straight forward.
- striking 11y agoNo, that's exactly what they do. They pipe audio track data through your mic port, like any other reader would. Although they did start encrypting the signal, because people started using these cheap readers for nefarious things.