Magnectic Stripe and POS

V5 Question
1

I am preparing a discount card for my regular customers. Kindly help me with these questions:

  1. What magnetic stripe coercivity is required for my system? Hi-co or lo-co?
  2. What track or tracks should be used to encode the data? 1, 2 and/or 3?
  3. Are there any specific characters or number of characters necessary to be used in the encoded data
2

All of these points are specific to the reader.
The coercivity of the reader should match the cards, SambaPOS has no relation on this level.
Likewise for tracks, it just depends on how you setup reader, think often if you just need single line of digets for pin etc you just use one track and leave the others blank.
Just use a plane number string and ensure your readers have facility to enable <CR> (carriage return) suffix which ‘enter keys’ after inputting the data

3

Thanks very much. Points well noted but I wanted to know if all the three points are recommended for my POS since I want to produce a magnetic stripe card encoded to the specifications of the POS.

4

MSR readers are just keyboard emulators/HID devices. SambaPOS will see them as a keyboard. All an MSR does is type very fast. So long as they output a consistent sequence which you can configure SambaPOS to act upon.
This is often done by having a consistent first few digets to help separate.
For example if you used MSR cards for users, gift cards and other things you might have the pins/number strings on the cards as such;
91xxxxxx user pins
92xxxxxx loyalty cards
93xxxxxx other cards
So you can constrain the numberpad entered event to react depending on these key prefixes.
The main thing I say is to ensure the readers have the carriage return function so that after swipe it sends the return keystroke to ‘enter’ the number keyed. Without it you would have to press enter or the numberpad tick to enter the number for processing.
You can simulate the process which would happen with MSR simply by typing the number and pressing enter if you wish to understand better.

5

Thanks for the clarification.