Portable 1990s POS Will Strain Your Back

August 13, 2023 by Chris Lott 4 Comments

[JR] over at [Tech Throwback] got ahold of an unusual piece of gear recently — a portable Point of Sale (POS) credit card machine from the late 1990s (video, embedded below the break ). Today these machines can be just a small accessory that works in conjunction with your smart phone, but only the most dedicated merchants would lug this behemoth around. The unit is basically a Motorola bag phone, a credit card scanner, a receipt printer, a lead-acid battery, and a couple of PCBs crammed into a custom carrying case

Despite having a lot of documentation, [JR] struggles to find any information on this U.S. Wireless POS-50. He finds that the credit card scanner is an Omron CAT-95 authorization terminal, and the Motorola SCN-2397B phone appears to come from the Soft-PAK series.

He is able to power it up, but can’t do much with is because he is missing the authorization password. But regardless, with the demise of the Advanced Mobile Phone System for over a decade, this 850 MHz band analog phone can’t connect to the network anymore.

If you happen to know anything about this old POS, or used a similar luggable system for accepting credit cards in the 1990s, let us know in the comments below.

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Upcycling A VFD

September 23, 2021 by Al Williams 29 Comments

A lot of electronics wind up in landfills, and when [Playful Electronics] saw an old cash register heading for the dump, he decided to give its VFD display a new life as an Arduino peripheral. While you might not find the exact same parts, it is still fun to watch him work through the process, and you might find some tips for doing your own upcycle project next time you see some old tech heading out to pasture.

The project was relatively straightforward since data for the display was available. It is meant to connect via RS232 with a point of sale printer, so working with it is pretty straightforward.

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Teardown: VeriFone MX 925CTLS Payment Terminal

July 8, 2019 by Tom Nardi 53 Comments

Regular Hackaday readers may recall that a little less than a year ago, I had the opportunity to explore a shuttered Toys “R” Us before the new owners gutted the building. Despite playing host to the customary fixture liquidation sale that takes place during the last death throes of such an establishment, this particular location was notable because of how much stuff was left behind. It was now the responsibility of the new owners to deal with all the detritus of a failed retail giant, from the security camera DVRs and point of sale systems to the boxes of employee medical records tucked away in a back office.

Clipping from New York Post. September 24th, 2018.

The resulting article and accompanying YouTube video were quite popular, and the revelation that employee information including copies of social security cards and driver’s licenses were left behind even secured Hackaday and yours truly a mention in the New York Post. As a result of the media attention, it was revealed that the management teams of several other stores were similarly derelict in their duty to properly dispose of Toys “R” Us equipment and documents.

Ironically, I too have been somewhat derelict in my duty to the good readers of Hackaday. I liberated several carloads worth of equipment from Geoffrey’s fallen castle with every intention of doing a series of teardowns on them, but it’s been nine months and I’ve got nothing to show for it. You could have a baby in that amount of time. Which, incidentally, I did. Perhaps that accounts for the reshuffling of priorities, but I don’t want to make excuses. You deserve better than that.

So without further ado, I present the first piece of hardware from my Toys “R” Us expedition: the VeriFone MX 925CTLS. This is a fairly modern payment terminal with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, such as support for NFC and EMV chip cards. There’s a good chance that you’ve seen one of these, or at least something very similar, while checking out at a retail chain. So if you’ve ever wondered what’s inside that machine that was swallowing up your debit card, let’s find out.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: It’s Like Apple Pay, But For Receipts

July 6, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

There’s Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Wallet, and a host of other ways to pay for stuff with your phone. What about receipts, though? Do you really need to carry around little bits of paper to prove to incredulous friends you have, indeed, bought a donut? The proof is back home, in the file. Under D, for donut.

[Hisham] is working on a very interesting system for the Hackaday Prize. It’s effectively the the opposite side of every point of sale transaction that Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Wallet are working on. Instead of handling payment, [Hisham]’s Aelph handles receipts.

[Hisham]’s project is hardware, with a small device that plugs into a point of sale terminal. This device transmits a receipt to the Aleph app (or a third party app), and uploads a PDF copy of the receipt to a server. Other than a small hardware box, there’s no additional software required for a POS terminal. For retailers, it’s as easy as plugging in a box, and for consumers, it’s as easy as downloading an app.

The hardware was prototyped on a TI LaunchPad featuring a TIVA C microcontroller. This, along with the NFC eval kit give Aleph more than enough power to connect to a company LAN and spit out a few PDFs. You can check out one of [Hisham]’s demo videos below.

There are a lot of benefits to a electronic receipts; if you ever need a receipt, odds are you’ll scan it anyway – a dead tree receipt is just inefficient. There’s also some nasty chemicals in thermal receipt paper. You only need to Google ‘BPA receipt’ for that evidence. Either way, it’s a great idea, and we long for the day that our wallets aren’t stuffed to Costanzaesque proportions, and a time where we won’t need a scanner to complete an expense report.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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Building New Interfaces With An IPad

April 22, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

There’s a word – synchronicity – to describe two disparate events that occur together in a meaningful way. We see this a lot in the Hackaday tip line; two people send in somewhat similar hacks solving similar problems in similar ways nearly simultaneously. Here’s two builds by [Bryce] and [spektakx] that hit our inbox within minutes of each other that both implement existing interfaces with iPads.

iPad turntable controller

[spektakx] sent in an iPad powered DJ MIDI controller he built as a prototype to test out the size, orientation and layout for an upcoming build. The turntable controllers are simple USB affairs made to jog and scratch records digitally. Although [spektakx] admits it’s a little unfinished, it’s still just a prototype. Also, he can use a Windows 7 tablet laptop for ‘more suited’ hardware. Check out [spektakx]’ video demo after the break.

an iPad cash register

[Hacktheory] found [Bryce]’s Flickr photolog of a DIY ‘Square’ cash register. The electronics part of this build is practically non-existent; it’s just an iPad with a credit card readers that plugs into the headphone jack. Yes, we just saw these ‘Square’ credit card readers this last week. The fabrication portion of this build is incredible – [Bryce] has a few wonderful pieces of walnut there, and did an exceptional job with the wood work. It’s probably not well suited to high-volume retail, but we couldn’t think of a better cash register for a boutique shop.

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