Category: Technical articles

  • Accessing Reader’s configuration from command line and in batch mode

    All SpringCard PC/SC Readers feature a set of Configuration Registers that allow to alter the Reader behaviour to match a particular hardware setup or end-user requirement. Editing the configuration is easy thanks to MultiConf, the new versatile configuration tool that covers all SpringCard products. But MultiConf is a GUI-application. When it comes to configuring numerous…

  • Using SCardControl under Linux and from a Java program

    SCardControl is the PC/SC function that makes it possible for the application to invoke ‘proprietary’ functions, implemented either in the PC/SC reader itself (CSB6, Prox’N’Roll PC/SC, EasyFinger or CrazyWriter) , or in its driver running on the PC, or in the PC/SC middleware. The prototype is: LONG SCardControl( SCARDHANDLE hCard, DWORD dwControlCode, LPCVOID lpInBuffer, DWORD nInBufferSize, LPVOID lpOutBuffer, DWORD nOutBufferSize, LPDWORD…

  • Print and encode simultaneously using SpringCard CrazyWriter and Evolis Zenius

    Evolis Zenius is a color or monochrome card printer. Evolis offers SpringCard CrazyWriter PC/SC (ISO 14443, ISO 15693 + 2 SAM) as the contactless encoding option for Zenius -as well as for the other printers in its portfolio. Zenius plus CrazyWriter makes it easy to issue personalized cards on-the-field. In this article we’ll show how…

  • Windows 7 complains on missing driver for smartcards – a practical workaround

    Smartcards and smartcard-aware applications using application level commands (APDUs) are older than Windows and worked very well in the past, until Microsoft suddently decided that a smartcard shouldn’t be handheld directly by the applications anymore, and introduced the concept of smartcard driver software (ICC Service Provider withing the PC/SC framework). This issue sometimes occurs with our…

  • Mifare Plus in a nutshell

    Following the breakdown of Mifare Classic security, NXP has released a new generation of contactless cards to fill the gap, the Mifare Plus. To ease the migration of the existing applications, this new chip keeps the memory model of the Mifare Classic : the card is structured as an array of 16-byte blocks, and the…

  • Java + PC/SC = accessing smartcards from a web page

    The Java Smartcard I/O API (javax.smartcardio, JSR 268) introduced in Java 1.6 is the bridge between PC/SC readers and the Java world. Java-based applications and applets may now communicate with smartcards in an interoperable and portable way. This makes it possible for web pages to access data stored in smartcards, or to invoke services running…