Magtek Magstripe Card Readers

I am trying to write a program in VB.net to read from a Magtek Magstripe Card Reader. Has anyone been able to get the stripe info from one?

Probably, but not without some help from the vendor.

Do they have an SDK that you can get your hands on?

All I can find is a sample application.

Did you get anything worth while from this site?

http://www.magtek.com/support/docume..._swipe_ttl.asp

I have no experience with HID devices so it really doesn’t help.

First try this: connect your reader to the usb port, then open Notepad and leave Notepad as the focused application; then swipe a card through the reader. If you see text in Notepad, then the reader emulates a keyboard and you need to receive the data via a texbox or other control in .Net that can receive keystrokes and generate text. Then the trick is to set the Focus of the textbox in the .Net application so that it will receive the reader data and process it.

The other option is to obtain a reader that outputs RS-232C through either a standard COM (DB9) connector, or via USB and the vendor's USB-COM Port driver software.

I need to be able to use it when the windows doesn’t have focus. So the keyboard interrupter will not work.

Then you will need a serial port device that can be monitored with the .Net SerialPort object; or you can try to find some HID .Net interfaces (Google USB HID .Net) that you can use with your application. MagTek makes a serial port interface version of the Full Size Swipe reader.