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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

I’ve occasionally gotten to watch transit workers open up and service the magnetic stripe card readers in the BART. Those things are complicated. It may well cost less to outright replace a contactless reader module on a fare gate than to service a magnetic stripe ticket machine once. Even an Adafruit PN532 board is only $40.

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I've not worked with the Adafruit PN532, but for an extra $10 you can get a Pepper C1 USB from Eccel which is very easy to work with. It is a stand-alone device, so you don't have to connect it to anything but power. Has WiFi & BT built in and has a built-in web server to configure it with, you can have it make calls via REST, MQTT, WebSocket.

Interestingly, the Pepper C1 is essentially a PN518 (presumably a sibling of the PN532 on Adafruit's board) hooked up to an ESP32. So a very simple device - and I've had a project on the backburner which is pretty much a DIY clone of it. If they made a USB-C version I'd ditch mine and buy it in a heartbeat.

BART stopped accepting paper tickets last year, presumably because of the complexity (not just the ticket barriers, but also the fare machines and add value machines that also had to handle them): https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2023/news20230911

Yeah, they moved to a native integration with Apple/Google/Samsung Wallets, and Clipper cards as a backup (but they really try to discourage them, at least for tourists).

The cool thing is that their thing doesn't work with all Android phones for an unknown reason (various people from the transit agency said "oh Android? Yeah it doesn't always work with Android"), which you have no way of knowing before topping up money and trying to use your phone.

If anyone is curious, it was a Xiaomi Redmi phone, a midrange one that has no issues paying over NFC. A OnePlus next to it with the same Android version worked just fine.

And if a machine jams not only do you need staff to spend hours to repair it, but you need to pay staff, or contractors, to do it.

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