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Ask Slashdot: An Open Handheld Terminal For Retail Stores?
Evil Al writes "From the ubiquitous Verifone card terminals to the fancy Apple Store terminals, point-of-sale devices are everywhere. But does anyone know of an open terminal (with printer + Wi-Fi), preferably running Linux, that we can use to run a custom application for retail, made by a reputable manufacturer?"
you know, some things just don't exist yet. like fusion power, warp drive, and cold fusion.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
But does anyone know of an open terminal (with printer + Wi-Fi), preferably running Linux, that we can use to run a custom application for retail, made by a reputable manufacturer?
Just curious but why does the operating system underneath it all matter? It seems the application is key and you can open source that regardless of the platform it is running on. Why not an iPod touch + card reading sled + open source app, an app that you distribute internally as an enterprise app so it doesn't need the Apple approval process that a regular app would need?
If you intend to process credit card payments through your custom application on the point-of-sale device, you'll likely fall under the purview of the Payment Card Industry's Payment Application Data Security Standard (PCI PA-DSS), which may require a source code audit and limit what you can have the software do. That may be no problem for you depending on your resources and intended use of your software, but it's worth keeping in mind.
Without the printer option, I would guess that there are a number of Linux driven pads around, then use a central networked printer.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Ask Slashdot: An Open Handheld Terminal For Retail Stores?
Sure, whether or not a handheld solution is necessary is debatable, but the poster did ask for advice on handheld units.
Uh.... in the title?
I saw that, but I'm wondering why it is in the title and not the summary. The text from the submitter is short enough that he easily could have said "handheld" if that is what he wanted, but he never did. Which leaves me wondering why it is in the subject line but not in the text.
Of course, we all know that slashdot editors are perfect and never make a mistake, ever, anywhere...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
if their voting machines are anything to go by, they're open as in Goatse.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Well, score 1 out of 3. Fusion power and cold fusion both exist, just on scales too small to be practical (so far).
:o)
It would be nice if I could say the same about warp drives...
Correction: "... too small and unreliable..."
That's a pretty looking IP address you have there....
I'll ask the easy question.. WHY?
Seriously, when you business relies on a machine that must work or you are losing money, everyone wants someone to turn to when it doesn't work. That someone isn't a man page or IRC channel or mailing list or whatever support for $foo GPL program here. It's a computer, not a holy war. You press buttons and it does things. When you want a computer you control, you run linux, when you want a computer that grandma can use, you give her a Mac and when you want retail system that checks people out, you run whatever OS that your POS maker asks you to.
Not sure I'd want my payment system running on WiFi... but I'm not an expert on how secure this would be.
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
Submission: An open handheld terminal for retail stores?
It comes directly from the submitter's title in which they asked the question.
Dr. House?
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Without thinking about it too much - is there any reason you couldn't get some Android tablets and rig them up to do what you want?
Stuff that actually matters rarely comes out first or is even remotely available in 'open source' circles
Yeah, nobody would ever think to use one of those stupid web browser thingies since Mosaic gave their source code out to whoever wanted it. Not that there's anything important to look at on those toy webservers like CERN httpd, and if any of it was important, it certainly wasn't written in perl or php.
But hey, you've got a point, sendmail was opensource and pretty much all my email is spam.
AML makes Linux-powered portable handheld computers with Wi-Fi and barcode scanning capability, and they'll give you their source disk with your hardware if you ask, so you can modify it as much as you like if their standard suite of applications don't suit you. You would also need to add a printer like the Epson TM-T88 and an RS232 magstripe-reader like the Unitech MS-240. For the actual card clearing, you'd probably either tie this system into your existing POS mainframe (if you have one) or you'd tie it into an Internet-based POS solution like Authorize.net, or if you are feeling ambitious, you can integrate over SSL directly with a clearing network like TSYS (formerly VisaNet / VITAL). Of course, your biggest expenditure is probably going to be paying someone to write the software to tie all this together for you (unless you can pull it all off yourself, in which case hats off to you!)
http://www.amltd.com/product.asp?pid=m7220
http://pos.epson.com/products/prodsPMOP.htm
http://ute.com/products_info.php?pid=211
P.S.
I have worked on the AML portable computers before. I have not specifically worked with the Epson printer or the Unitech magstripe reader, but both should work in conjunction with the AML unit's WiFi and serial capabilities respectively. You would probably need to custom-make a cable for the magstripe reader since the AML unit uses a non-standard RS232 connector (RJ45 if I recall correctly).
The asker is probably looking for the Exadigm XD2000
It is pretty much exactly the specs requested.
So you have some alternative theory as to why stars shine, then...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Haha. Well, that may be reliable... but I guess I meant controllable.
Cold fusion in cells like the one used by Pons and Fleishman has been observed many times now over the last 20 years. But never (AFAIK) in a way that was predictable or controllable. Almost as though there is some unknown variable. But until we are able to predict when it will happen and how much, it isn't of much use to anybody.
Symbol is now part of Motorola: http://www.motorola.com/Business/US-EN/Business%20Product%20and%20Services/Bar%20Code%20Scanning/Scan-equipped%20Mobile%20Computers. Fate worse than d
But, if you want open, SquareUp mentioned elsewhere looks to be the easiest approach- just plug it into the audio jack of any phone/tablet/whatever. Using a camera for barcode recognition is ok for very low volume transactions only though.
I don't know who makes it but BCF uses Linux on their POS systems. ARTS (http://www.nrf-arts.org/) maybe of some help.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
I use to do some consulting work with Retail Navigator (http://www.retailnavigator.com/) back in '00. They had a handheld sytsem running Linux. I don't know if they still do.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
These days my HTC phone costs substantially less than one of those things did, has better battery life, a bar code scanner library that works respectably well and can be programmed in Java. Oh, and a working wireless TCP/IP connection. Hmm. Which would I choose?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If I were looking, I'd look for something like this. Wifi for weeks per charge and very light. You could customize the hell out of this e-ink tablet.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
A lot of really good companies make just that. Did you not bother to search?
It doesn't matter what they run. I helped develop an ePoS system for a public house running on LAMP, with the ePoS terminals bought on eBay running Damn Small Linux and various brand hand-held devices with wireless networking running WinMob, accessing different addresses for their respective interfaces. One of the only times I've done work in exchange for free beer! :D
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Integration of payment facilities is what tends to break "my own POS" solutions. As soon as you touch a regular payment system you'll hit the circus surrounding PCI compliance, and that's a headache in itself.
There is something new on its way, but as first talks have only started this month I don't expect anything exciting to happen for at least another 3 months. It's probably going to be 2012 before this comes out proper..
Good luck!
Insert
"Many recent experiments by other scientists in the field have shown that cold fusion can be controlled and predicted quite effectively"
If you have any links to such I would be very interested in seeing them.
As would I, so long as the are links to reproducible experiments, not just irreproducible anecdotes and oddities.
However, don't forget the real cold fusion: muon-catalyzed fusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion It works best when truly cold -- like the temperature of liquid hydrogen. ;-)
Too bad that the energy cost to make the muons is much greater than that from the fusion....
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
I don't get why you don't just get a Vx680 or Vx820 that are coming out - you can run your own application layer on top of the software on it (making it as open as you need to be). Both PCI:DSS and PA:DSS will need to be adhered to to, of course.
I googled for "Linux POS" and got this
http://ritchan.dasaku.net/computers/why-linux-is-a-piece-of-shit
You see, compiling the Linux kernel was harder than I thought. Well, not harder than I thought ... it just suddenly didn't want to cooperate after my hundred times compiling the kernel. For Linux in VMWare, I had to rummage around for ages until I finally figured out that I had to include Fusion MPT, whatever the hell that was. Funny how when I searched for Symbios 53c1030 it didn't show up, although when I went to Fusion MPT there it was, staring at me happily in the face, along with its brothers the 53c1020, 53c1010, and who knows what not (Hint: It's not funny at all). And get this ... when I tried to mount the iso images using the loopback, and with EFS compiled as a module and loaded, the fucking VFAT driver comes up and tries to make sense of the filesystem on the iso images. That's right, the EFS module didn't even do its fucking job, which was the whole fucking point of recompiling the kernel in the first fucking place. Worse of all, why the hell was the VFAT driver coming up? What the fuck? Don't try to be a hero, you just got yourself nuked, shitface.
So I tried going into my secret hideout - the LUKS encrypted supersecret Linux partition on my hard drive (not so secret if you just fdisk it). One thing led to another, and soon I was struggling furiously with this shitty program called mkinitrd (no doubt written by a monkey who was too busy jacking off to pay any attention to coding), which insists on making a gzipped ext2 filesystem image with your modules in it, instead of making a gzipped cpio archive, which the kernel uses. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF PACKING MY KERNEL MODULES IN A FORMAT THAT THE KERNEL DOES NOT, REPEAT, DOES NOT, RECOGNIZE? The whole debacle wasted another 3 hours of my life, and I was still nowhere closer to getting IRIX 6.5 on my Indy.
And suddenly, up comes my shitty ext3 filesystem telling it can no longer find a superblock on so and so partition.
Fuck you, Linux.
Hope it is helpful to people considering Linux in a non hobby environment. Particularly "Don't try to be a hero, you just got yourself nuked, shitface." You can probably make yourself a macro in Emacs's Xrwqpxzzkpltk blogging module (don't use the 1.0.4pre version it's got a bug that posts all the images in ~/porn/ to your blog, stay on 1.0.1) so you don't need to type it out each time you use it and just type Esc Esc Ctrl Shift Alt S DTBAHYJGYN,S Ctrl F Esc AcpiPowerButton K.
Hell yeah! Now you're cooking with an open flame.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Does a card card reader read the same kind of card cards that go in an automated teller machine machine?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Specifically cold fusion. Google Rossi and the e-cat. He says there will be a test installation done in October. It's hard to say for sure, but the guy has over $500,000 of his own money sunk into it and isn't interested in investors, so there's no obvious financial gain to be had from lying to us. His patent application was denied from the Italian patent system because he can't explain how it works.
I have this. If anyone is interested, visit my web site (where you won't see any mention of this specific project yet but where anyone can see who I am and what I do) and find my contact information there. I have provided my POS help and source code to a few people over the years so that they can establish POS businesses in their locations. I would submit many of the details of new things going on to Slashdot but there's no guarantee it would be published so instead I'll make a whitepaper available to anyone who wants it and contacts me. I'm busy with creating a next generation POS which won't require any POS computer(s) in any retail location itself. What I currently have is not really simply a POS solution but actually more of a touchscreen development framework for displays of all sizes, from the smallest to the largest, which allows people to work collaboratively across the LAN & Internet. I've been at this for several decades now and have always believed that the future will be all about touch screens everywhere. I'm not a programmer myself so if there are any programmers who want to work with me then I invite them to get in touch. There are many people I am working with already but we always need people who want to also be involved in things touchscreen related.
--Gene Mosher
He should try patenting in the US then. Here, you don't have to explain how it works. But in some rare cases, you might be called upon to show a working model.
Go Android young man... go Android.
A cool WiFi Samsung pad, local server, ssh
links all ways (https)... or better a ssh tunnel
and VPN.
The key phrase is custom application.
The entire application environment needs
to be "designed" and "maintained".
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.