A magnetic stripe card is a type of card capable of storing data by modifying the magnetism of tiny iron-based magnetic particles on a band of magnetic material on the card. The magnetic stripe, sometimes called swipe card or magstripe, is read by swiping past a magnetic reading head. There are up to three tracks on magnetic cards used for financial transactions, known as tracks 1, 2, and 3. Track 3 is virtually unused by the major worldwide networks, and often isn’t even physically present on the card by virtue of a narrower magnetic stripe. Point-of-sale card readers almost always read track 1, or track 2, and sometimes both, in case one track is unreadable. The minimum cardholder account information needed to complete a transaction is present on both tracks. Track 1 has a higher bit density (210 bits per inch vs. 75), is the only track that may contain alphabetic text, and hence is the only track that contains the cardholder’s name.

Magnetic Card Reader

Mentorel designed a few variations of the Magnetic Card Reader with wireless technologies: Bluetooth and GSM. All devices were designed to comply with the ISO 7811 standard. Our customer from Europe needed the following features for devices:

• Support for 2-track and 3-track cards
• Swiping in both directions
• Error correction
• Bluetooth pairing with any compatible device: PC, smartphone, PDA, Tablet PC etc.
• GSM version with message encoding and SMS transmitting
• Long battery life (at least 24 hours)

To support 3-tracks cards and swiping in both directions Mentorel contacted Magtek, Inc. Since 1972, MagTek has been a leading manufacturer of electronic devices and systems for the reliable issuance, reading, transmission and security of cards, checks, PINs and other identification documents.

In conjunction with Magtek engineers we designed a universal magstripe reader that could read raw data from card tracks, encode data and transmit it to a remote host by any of available interfaces: UART, Bluetooth or GSM.

Magnetic Card Reader with Bluetooth

For the Bluetooth interface Mentorel engineers chose a fully integrated Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, class 2 module Bluegiga WT12. WT12 combines antenna, Bluetooth radio and an on-board iWRAP Bluetooth stack making it a cost-effective and easy-integrating solution for developers that want to quickly integrate Bluetooth wireless technology to their designs. To simplify the software solution the Serial Port Profile (SPP) was chosen for communications between a host and the reader. The key feature of the reader is that we implemented very power efficient application.