Tons of documentation available (Score 2, Interesting)

I do a lot of kiosk and interactive exhibit work that utilizes magnetic stripe readers for a variety of purposes, from Fujitsu and NCR ATM machines, to POS systems from Symbol and @POS, to serial readers from MagTech to off the shelf keyboard wedge readers from ID Tech, and I never managed to run across Acidus' site when doing research. His app StripeSnoop looks fairly interesting as a tool. I wanted to point out that there is in fact a TON of information out there available from vendors and standards organizations from credit card track formatting, to ISO specs to you name it, they are all online. Its been said before, but you just need to spend a few minutes with google or talking to your hardware or software vendor and you can find what you need, you just need to dig around a bit. As an example, I recently spoke on the topic of Kiosks and Interactive exhibits at FlashForward 2004 in NY and along with some other things, I demonstrated an application for capturing track data from a keyboard wedge based card reader, and used the freely available specs from AAMVA (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators) http://www.aamva.org and their specs available here to decode drivers license information that conforms to their standard of encoding. I have used this in a couple of recent applications. I'm about to post up a version that decodes the most useful bits of credit card info (name, card number, expiration) that would be useful for integrating into POS systems, kiosks, etc. The source files (everything is done in Macromedia Flash Mx 2004 - yes not a lot of Flash fans on slashdot - but this is another example of how to use Flash for REAL applications) and more information can be found here: http://www.impossibilities.com/blog/entry_blog-155 .php - everything is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License - so have at it and start experimenting. It should be fairly simply to add in support for just about any type of track data you want to work with, at least data types that are compatible with keyboard wedge devices - its really just string manipulation and all you need to know are the rules for decoding the data. I use ID Tech's Omni Reader - a USB device that supports all three tracks and barcodes (including infrared barcodes) in one simple USB keyboard wedge device. In the example I put together, youll also find an application for using off the shelf bar code scanners like Symbols - that also hook up via a keyboard wedge interface - to look up UPC info from the free UPC Internet Database. Enjoy! -Rob