And the results?

The swiper worked great, not only was it cool looking but it worked flawlessly all weekend, swiping dozens of cards with almost no problems (one very old card with part of the stripe flaked off gave us trouble but the owner admitted it didn't work anywhere).

We learned a hell of a lot about magstripes and raw data encoding with this project and were informed by many people that because it doesn't assume the standard formatting like most off-the-shelf swipers, it can be used for reading non-standard cards like Metrocards! We hope others will build this project and use it to decode all sorts of magstripes