Question

I’m writing an application that needs access to a serial port (it’s a credit card reader). I’d like to be able to read and write to the port. The following seems like it would let me do exactly that: http://www.activexperts.com/serial-port-component/howto/html/. However, this deals with ActiveX/COM which means I’m tied to Windows.

Any better solutions for me? Would be nice if the solution would work on multiple platforms, not just Windows.

I’m using PHP.

Answer 1

Does the device emulate a keyboard? You’d be much better off getting the user to position the cursor inside a textbox (or putting the cursor there programmatically) and swiping the card if that’s the case.

I spent a lot of time writing a userspace driver in C for a Magtek Mini-Mag card reader only to realize years later that it was academic more than anything. I mean we used the code, only if we’d have gone with the keyboard solution there would have been tons of time to focus on other things.

For the Mini-Mag the USB/HID support in the kernel would recognize the device, hopefully there’s something similar for the device you’re getting.

Also, Windows has it’s own variant of USB/HID so the ‘treat it as a keyboard’ solution works pretty much out of the box for devices that act that way.