This year, I've got brand new platforms I need to support somehow. The most recent is a fundraising platform where someone is being paid to show us how to use it, and they arrive two hours before the show. That's just not sufficient.

As our small team generally handles all of our fundraising needs- from getting a trailer for the garbage to setting up the tables, we've taken it upon ourselvesd to handle what we can.

We were told that this platform only has an App for iPad/iPhone, and that it only supports one Stripe bluetooth card reader.

That would be great, but they have a website, and we have hundreds of people to assist- not a handful. Even with an external bluetooth keyboard for data entry, this is a step back- and requires hardware we don't really feel the need to purchase except for edge cases.

Enter the Deftun MSR90 USB Card Reader.

It's your basic card track reader as an HID device, which means it'll work with most devices with USB after 1997. Yes, nearly 30 years back.

The magic in this device is that I can program it to only return specific tracks. I only need Track 2. I'd like to assume other data, but it's too much effort. With minimal effort learning their tool, I have it pared down to Track 2, with no sentinel. I still get garbage from the rest of the entry, but that swipe saves 16 numbers entered per client, which is somewhere around 20-30 seconds per checkout. All for less than $20 per unit.

Clients will feel like they're being taken care of, see our technology used with pre-existing hardware (saving thousands), and the powers that be will still get to promote the leaps and bounds we're taking moving forward.

Sometimes, that's just enough.