I'll confess that I've done almost zero research on this topic as of right now aside from pricing readers and blank cards. So we're opening a new super-club here in Seattle. One of the ideas we'd like to pursue is that people are assigned a card. This can be a magstripe card or something with a barcode. Not really sure at the moment which way to go. The idea being that when they enter, we "swipe/scan" their card and we can log stats (# of visits, # guests, favorite drink so the bar has it ready, enter into contest, etc.) I was thinking we setup a simple netbook with a USB reader at the front door when they pay. Then we have another back at the bar. Connect via WiFi. Have a notebook somewhere behind the scenes that runs LAMP (or a VM thereof). No internet needed. The backend database and even web/GUI stuff is of course trivial with any LAMP stack. What I don't know is how do I interface _to_ PHP from say a magstripe reader. They're dirt cheap ($50), but I assume come with zero software. http://www.kanecal.net/mag-stripe-reader-scanner.html . And there are hundreds of these gadgets out there all the same basically. I guess what I'm hoping for is some pointers, from someone who's done this sort of thing. My gut thought is something so simple, where there is some XP software (or Linux I suppose) that reads the card (and generally they only have a number encoded on them) and this is sent via a URL we define, such as http://192.168.10.100/door.php?id=123456 or http://192.168.10.100/bar.php?id=123456 etc. (ignore the security issues and all that. It's trivial to encode the parameters, plus it's a closed system with WEP/WPA/WTF). But does anyone know of such a key piece of code? Like I said, I'm not locked into magcards. It could be a barcode reader just as easily. Or fingerprint scanner, or facial recognition. In the end it's just a unique "thing" that maps to a unique number. I just need the "FM" (F*ckin' Magic -- it's a programmer term -- look it up!) that goes in between PHP and the hardware. http://daevid.com "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use XML.'" Now they have two problems. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
