Any Alternative Uses For The MySmart Pad?

TellarHK muses: "Thinking back to the CueCat debacle, and on the topic of 'soon to be abandoned-ware,' has anyone considered mucking about with the MySmart mousepads? I picked up one of these on sale at Best Buy for $5, figuring someone might come out with a way to use the 'Smart' card reader as a tool for other applications. Sure, I know this'll get a lawyer's underwear in a bunch, but I don't recall signing any license stopping me. Maybe someone's come up with a quick and dirty program or routine for it, under either Linux or Windows?" These are also at CompUSA. Smart-card access to the basement? One more layer of security on your workstation? These look like fun, if someone has a driver.

Comments

Re:A little late

[AdamInParadise]

The problem with the TelMex card is that they are even dumber. They aren't made with flash mem (expensive). They are made of fuses. 1 unit == 1 fuse. The phone blow a fuse each time a unit is consumed. If you are really into that, you could put an EEPROM on your card, and simulate the behavior...

Google says...

[Spoing]

...not much. It looks like the consensus is that you can't use the card reader as a generic reader. It could be used for simple security, though, but no code seems to exist for it.

The mysmart.com web site seems to be down at the moment, so the company might have gone belly up. Check later...maybe they're using IIS and just need to reboot? :)

Interesting note: There's some comment on the company considering Linux support. Likely? Nope.

Mouse button input

[gmhowell]

I couldn't be bothered to wait for that flash demo (and that annoying fuck new-age music shit that is so common on the internet) to work, so I just looked at the pictures. Now, keep in mind that this is Slashdot, and I have just qualified myself as an expert on this product.

Does the pad do anything except for have extra little buttons on it? If that is all it does, you should just have to map them to some sort of x-input.

I know, I couldn't begin to do that either. But it looks fairly trivial. If it's that big a deal, find some developer and send him one.

American Express smartcard reader

[EMIce]

Likely, even more of us own this reader than the mousepad reader. American Express gave them out for free with their blue cards. Has anyone hacked it yet? The device looks fairly simple and the smartcard follows the ISO standard for layout. These are the same cards(physically) as those used in DTV receivers and other smartcard apps. They even sell blank cards with embedded microcontrollers that can be programmed in assembly or C. The cards do serial input and output, and when power is applied the stored program springs to life and talks via the TX/RX contact on the card. The cards can even be locked so the code inside isn't extractable. Someone could easily write code to do some serious key based authentication. If the American Express readers could be hacked to read and write the cards this could be cheaply accessible to all of us. Not to mention it'd be a great way to get people into microcontoller coding and all the neat associated applications.

Re:American Express smartcard reader

[TellarHK]

Cheaply accessible?

Hardly. First, that implies that people have a credit line that'll get you AmEx. And again, this comes across as just another example of Slashdot elitism. ''We all need to be making huge amounts of money to afford anything neat.'' There are a lot of things out there that truly are affordable, to people even with a lower level of income than what people may be used to with the high-paying (and rapidly vanishing) silicon valley lifestyle. For five dollars, I think something like this that doesn't require a whole hell of a lot of effort to pick up yet has the potential to become an actually useful item to people of all income brackets.

Posts like this, and articles saying that $2000 for a wearable computer is affordable really go a long way toward projecting the image that people that read here really don't have any interest in things that are actually truly affordable.

I'd like to hope we'll start seeing articles about things that are actually reasonably purchased on less than a $50/hr. income, but I doubt it.

Uhh...

[JediTrainer]

According to this page, the pad appears to be mostly a regular mouse pad but with added buttons for quick access to email, web sites (no doubt advertisements - notice the 'valuable discounts' line) and such.

On the other hand, this page mentions their 'smart card' which can be inserted into the pad. So yes, there is a reader. It stores settings for the pad, though. There's no guarantee, unfortunately, that there's a way to access the reader with the PC.

Then again, a quick disassembly of their software might prove me wrong.

The smart card.

[TellarHK]

Actually, I don't think the card itself stores information on the pad's features. It appears to me that the various inserts that the pad ships with, are each designed to tell the pad software which links to use. Not that the inserts are smart, but that the software is.

Now, the real question is how smart the card itself is? Is it a simple serial number that lets the software do all the work, or can information be stored on it? If the former, that might be better for security applications, and if the latter, it might be better suited toward saving personalized data. As each card is non-numbered, on the outside, appearing to have no way to uniquely ID them, it makes the whole matter completely up in the air. I'd like this to get to the main page so we can see more input. :)