🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <kwRVTB1w165w@halcyon.com> daniel r. mauch <daniel@halcyon.com> writes:
>                               Magnetic Card Swipe Reader
>
>     Some time ago there were several posts about Magnetic Card
>Readers and how to read the data. One of the files even had a C
>program called Swipe.C that would read  the data when a card was
>pushed thought the reader and could be displayed on screen or
>saved to a file.
>
>     A few weeks ago, I bought a SR&D mag card swipe reader in
>San Diego for $2.50. Using the information in the files posts
>dating back to Jan 92 , I was able to connect my swipe reader to
>my PC and using the program could read and store the contents of
>the card. The problem was that the data was a columnar listing of
>255's and 191's. I have deduced that the 255 is FF hex or 1111
>1111. The 191 is BF hex or 1011 1111. Since I am not a
>experienced programmer, I need some help in determining how to
>read the data.

What you're seeing is a raw dump of the data from the card reader.
Only one or two bit positions in each byte are significant (bit 6 for
sure, and probably one other - one for clock and one for data and
perhaps a third for card detected). You need to do a bit of work to
"digest" this raw data stream into meaningful data.

You say that you are not an experienced programmer; this is by no means
a "beginner" level task, so you may want to get someone with more
experience to sit down with you and play around. This will be really
tough to do over the net. ;-)