Students at NYU are developing a project to allow users of New York City’s MetroCard magnetic transit cards to donate leftover funds to charity directly from the card. It’s known as the MetroChange project and uses commonly available hardware, including an Arduino and mag stripe reader. The group really took a serious approach to development, examining the excellent work of hardware hackers in decoding the MetroCard. They reports: “We have done a lot of research on how magnetic stripes work and were able to port the MetroCard decryption protocol from a Windows machine to Arduino, so that now it is possible to read values off MTA MetroCards and show how much money is left.” The kiosk hardware consists of an Arduino, ethernet shield, LCD screen, IR transmitter and receiver, and an Electric Goldmine surplus magstripe cardreader.
You can find more on their prototyping process and project details at the Metrochange website.
This is a good example of the hacker community developing new uses for technology to benefit the public at large.
Via the Gothamist.