Not quite…

Part 1. Hardware Driver.

You need to install the USB/UART bridging drivers for the Card Reader to appear as a device.
http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/pages/usbtouartbridgevcpdrivers.aspx 

I have not tried the XP driver. I’m developing Pebbles on a Win7 VirtualBox vm.

After this is installed, you plug in the card reader, and then look at the Device Manager on your machine. Note the port being used, and then the port number being used gets used in the Pebbles setup.

You don’t see the device unless it is plugged in… (you knew that)… so plug it in and note the com port number. 3 in this case.



Part 2. Setting up Pebbles.

The files you need should all be in the share.

You will need to set up the dir structure for pebbles like the following. Where you put it doesn’t matter. The dir doesn’t have to be named pebbles.

…\pebbles\win32-x86\MasterCom.dll
…\pebbles\win32-x86\MasterRD.dll
…\pebbles\pebbles2.jar
…\pebbles\teams.txt
…\pebbles\prefs.txt
…\pebbles\controls.txt

Then run Pebbles. Go to Pre-event -> Event Setup and enter the COM port number (just the number) into the dialog.

Closing this dialog will force a card reader restart. You will get an alert, and a warning in the status panel, if the card reader can’t be communicated with.

Part 3. Clearing the cards

Two step process. Do all the cards with #1 then all the cards with #2. You shouldn’t need to touch the mouse or keyboard until you are done. Just keep presenting cards to the reader.

#1 Pre-event -> Prepare Cards
#2 Pre-event -> Confirm Cards Preparation

Try some testing while you are at it. Pull some cards away early. Do they still confirm as okay? Try confirming a card that has never been prepared. 

And have been more than busy... but I'd better start this process!

Been a bit busy at this end. To make matters worse about 110 of the 140 people in my group at work are getting the axe. It has been on the news. A lot.

Let me know whether you really can’t get a more recent Java onto the laptop. I’m not sure how I can help if you can’t.

I haven’t heard from Andy since Rosalie departed.