Serial readers

Serial drivers must be configured to operate on a particular port and respond to a particular name. The reader.conf file is used for this purpose.

It has the following syntax:

# Configuration file for pcsc-lite
# David Corcoran <corcoran@musclecard.com>

FRIENDLYNAME  Generic Reader
DEVICENAME    /dev/ttyS0
LIBPATH       /usr/lib/pcsc/drivers/libgen_ifd.so
CHANNELID     1

• The pound sign # denotes a comment.

• The FRIENDLYNAME field is an arbitrary text used to identify the reader. This text is displayed by commands like pcsc_scan²that prints the names of all the connected and detected readers.

• The DEVICENAME field was not used for old drivers (using the IFD handler version 2.0 or previous). It is now (IFD handler version 3.0) used to identify the physical port on which the reader is connected. This is the device name of this port. It is dependent of the OS kernel. For example the first serial port device is called /dev/ttyS0 under Linux and /dev/cuaa0 under FreeBSD.

• The LIBPATH field is the filename of the driver code. The driver is a dynamically loaded piece of code (generally a drivername.so* file).

• The CHANNELID is no more used for recent drivers (IFD handler 3.0) and has been superseded by DEVICENAME. If you have an old driver this field is used to indicate the port to use. You should read your driver documentation to know what information is needed here. It should be the serial port number for a serial reader.

  CHANNELID was the numeric version of the port in which the reader will be located. This may be done by a symbolic link where /dev/pcsc/1 is the first device which may be a symbolic link to /dev/ttyS0 or whichever location your reader resides.