I recently received an ACR33B from Steven Williams (Thanks Steven!). Now, I'm sure people know that it will read track 1 and 2, but initially it looks like a pain to move the head to allow the shim trick to work.
Opening the device is simple - remove the rubber mat on the bottom, and unscrew the outermost four screws. Do not unscrew the two central screws, as this is unnecessary.
Internally, the head is mounted on a leaf spring, which is held in place by two pins at each end. From eyeballing the head mount, it looks like the head is not symmetrical on the mount. Rotating the head through 180 degrees appears to allow track 2 to still be read, so it doesn't seem to put the alignment out too much. I'm guesing that it also allows track 3 to be read, but I don't have any cards with a valid track 3 to test with.
This, at least, would allow the shim trick to be used with the ACR33B reader without much in the way of modification.
It also looks like it's probably possible to retreive the raw data (as decoded by the F/2F decoder) from the microcontroller onboard the device. However, I've no documentation about the host controlled mode, so I'm running a bit blind here.
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I recently received an ACR33B from Steven Williams (Thanks Steven!). Now, I'm sure people know that it will read track 1 and 2, but initially it looks like a pain to move the head to allow the shim trick to work.
Opening the device is simple - remove the rubber mat on the bottom, and unscrew the outermost four screws. Do not unscrew the two central screws, as this is unnecessary.
Internally, the head is mounted on a leaf spring, which is held in place by two pins at each end. From eyeballing the head mount, it looks like the head is not symmetrical on the mount. Rotating the head through 180 degrees appears to allow track 2 to still be read, so it doesn't seem to put the alignment out too much. I'm guesing that it also allows track 3 to be read, but I don't have any cards with a valid track 3 to test with.
This, at least, would allow the shim trick to be used with the ACR33B reader without much in the way of modification.
It also looks like it's probably possible to retreive the raw data (as decoded by the F/2F decoder) from the microcontroller onboard the device. However, I've no documentation about the host controlled mode, so I'm running a bit blind here.