Wire up

Wiring up is really trivial, we simply soldered ribbon cable to each pin (even tho we didn't use them all).

Then connected +5V and ground and the three track 1 pins to the Teensy. Of course, you can also use an Arduino (or any other microcontroller) and just use the Serial output instead of Keyboard to read the data off.

We also added a piezo buzzer to give us some audible feedback.

Code snippets

This will be a quick review of a few interesting bits in the source which you of course check out on GitHub.

The first part is the data reading loop, which grabs the first ~80 non-zero bytes. We have to toss out the zeros as they are just buffers on the edge of the magstripe. There should be at least 4 but we don't use them so they get ignored in the loop.