Bill,
Thanks for the great offer! I'll take you up on it. There's way more
info in your reply than you may know,
1) I'm also in Florida (Deerfield Beach) and will be scanning
primarily FL DL's.
2) It's nice to know that your client has been running the application
for years (I'm assuming from that, that FL's Mag Stripe encoding has
been basically un-changed for years, although it won't change my plans
for version control.)
I looked into the Cherry keyboards, but the cheapest 3 track I found
was around $200. I settled in on a MagTek 3 track keyboard wedge for
$69. Besides the $130 difference, MagTek's web-site also provides a
keyboard wedge .OCX that has some helpful Methods for
retreiving/parsing track data and a very useful card swipe Event.
I'll send you a screen shot of the Access application (for research
and .OCX testing) I finished this morning, if your interested, I'll
send the test .MDB and .OCX.
I would like to look at you parsing code, so check you mail.
Thank a lot.
Tom
On 3 May 2005 04:21:01 -0700,
bi********@netscape.net wrote:
It has been some years since I've done this, but I was able to
successfully read drivers licenses using a keyboard with mag stripe
reader ("Cherry keyboard") for a customer processing application. Most
of the licenses were issued in Florida, so there was some consistency
but not as much as you think. Note that you will receive information
from multiple tracks on the mag stripe, each with a different segment
of information. I believe that some tracks were missing on some cards.
I remember that I scanned several licenses into text files using the
mag reader and developed a parsing routine based on that sample. I set
up the scanner to send a command (Control-something) before the start
of the scan (track 1) which opened a little form that would catch the
scanned text. I also had the scanner send a carriage return at the end
of the scan (track 3 in my case) which would effectively click a
command button on the form to start the processing.
The client is still using the application and I can see that they've
successfully scanned thousands of drivers licenses, so I know it works.
I can't seem to find any old raw scans, but I still have the parsing
routines so if I can be of any help, let me know.
