Anyone on the board know anything about them or have any experience in

programming

  POS

mac

 hines?  Hit the Kaptain up if you do please - he has some questions.




/kk

Point Of Sale ?

Cheers,
td

yeah point of sale - the Kaptain has an idea but doesn't know anything about

programming

  them.  He doesn't need it to process credit cards but does need to be able to swipe a card and have it transfer information over the inte

rnet

  to a server for processing.  clear as mud right?

The simplest ones simply read the card and send the digits as keyboard presses to [any software that is open] - more complicated ones talk to proprietary software. We don't have a swiper at all, using a web-based charger I wrote that talks to our gateway/merchant.

Ping me if I can help more...

I have access to a USB card reader that reads the three tracks off the ma

gnet

 ic strip and you can do what you like with the data. I wouldn't think it would be hard to write something to talk to it. We also have an encoder to write cards so of course I have no shortage of credit cards 

Cheers,
td

if your talking about legit uses, which I assume you are, there are hundreds of different apps with hundreds of different terminals. Some are web based, others are client based with local webservers, others are fully integrated systems with custom software.

the difficulty might be with the fact that the actual communication portion, that actually talks to the processor, needs to be certified by that processor. but I would guess that there are some systems that allow access to the data, before it is put into the "processing" functionality.

If you have something that you are looking to do, I actually have contacts at TSYS Aqcuiring (used to be VITAL), since I do work for their marketing and products departments. I know someone who "might" be able to answer your questions. but only if we are talking legit usage mind you. otherwise, they will fish you up if they even suspect foul play.

yeah totally legit use - I don't even want to process credit cards at all.  The project is for a proprietary card for a very specific use.  The unit needs to be small like a regular POS terminal, have a keypad, and a printer on it.  The more compact the unit the better.

So any of the difficulty with dealing with CC processors or anything else you can toss out because no CC will ever be processed through the terminal.

I may be making it more difficult than it is and it may be that every POS is programmable I have just never worked with them and reading about it via google didn't yield the kinds of results that i needed to tell me anything useful.

So with all that said - any ideas?

Then I'm back to the little reader -> keystrokes

mac

 hines - they are tiny and a USB connection. Simple simple.

Ping me kaptain I'll talk you through it, you can make up you own cards, print and encode and read all in the one

mac

 hine or as perk said you can get an rs232 or USB card reader swipe

mac

 hine.

Some examples:

http://www.ppc.com.au/module/direct.

php

  (it's Australian, hope that's OK with perk)

http://www.magtek.com/products/card_readers/index.

asp

 

Cheers,
td

ah, you are talking about a club card or a discount card or something like that. ok. yea what TD and perk said then.