Arduino magnetic stripe decoder

Step 4 Where do I go from here?

If you're interested in learning more about magnetic stripe cards, the attached article, "A Day in the Life of a Flux Reversal" by Count Zero is required reading. This document is pretty much the bible on the nuts and bolts (volts?) of how magnetic stripes physically work. It also contains information about the standard formatting of the tracks on magnetic stripes, which is helpful in interpreting data that you get from the setup shown in this instructable.

Also, check out Stripe Snoop. This software requires a slightly more complicated hardware setup, but comes with a database of known card formats and will attempt to parse human-readable data out of any card that you swipe through it. For example, if you swipe your credit card or driver's license, it will recognize it, and show you all of your personal information that is stored on that card!

Although, since this setup outputs data directly to the serial port of the computer, I'm sure that with a little code hacking it wouldn't be too hard to get this reader to interface directly to Stripe Snoop.....