Hi Ed,

Thank-you for the information.

TFISHER

>>Hi Ed,
>>
>>I am investigating magnetic stripe readers. Do you have any suggested readers that are easy to use to read driver's licenses and work well with VFP?
>>
>
>I've never had a need to use on, but NCR makes a complete line of mag-stripe reader; they're a major vendor for things like credit card reader products and POS terminals. I have no idea of what their interface looks like; I know that they marketed a wedge device a couple of years ago, and have no idea of the cost might be - I know a couple of local developers who do POS and medical apps that use the mag stripe device; they both tell me that reading in from the mag stripe device is not the problem, but parsing the data is the main issue, since it's a data stream, I'd expect that you'd have to write whatever CRC processing is used to detect an error in reading; typical mechanisms involve a bit-by-bit or byte-by-byte evaluation of a simple polynomial (makes you wish you hadn't slept through Algebra in high school.)
>
>I recommend that you contact your state's DOT to find out what equipment they're using - in CT, at least at the moment, we're barcoded rather than mag-striped, and it's likely that there are different standards just like there arte several standards for barcodes. I've worked with as couple of SmartCard systems, but that required the use of an MS-provided SDK that would've been painful to use at best; as it was, the MS SDK required callbacks, soat least part of that would've had to be done in C (maybe VB). I have no idea what the state of that technology is at present, but I know someone I worked with at Pitney Bowes, now working on SmartCard technology, and he told me at one point that there was an ActiveX control in beta perhaps a year ago.
>
>You might consider doing part of this in VB or C++ to create an ActiveX control if there isn't one available, or the drivers are designed for VB and C++, so creating an ActivX control and accessing that from VFP might be a better solution.
>
>>>mag stripe card readers and similar devices are often available as a wedge device - a wedge style device connects up through the keyboard, and input from it comes in as if it were typed in at the keyboard, so you can get the information through a textbox on a form.<