I know this topic has been talked about before but it was veering off from my issue. we'd like to be able to use an iPAD, which currently has 2X set up and can use the full Tess app just fine. the question has arisen if we can connect a card reader to the tablet for membership and/or contribution dues. I know square works with their own processor so that wouldn't work, I really just want a swiper that will read the card, input the info into Tess and then finish the sale through Tess. I opened a ticket and they didn't even seem to know the answer. I'm thinking the Magtek iDynamo. anyone have any experience with this?
If I understand it correctly, the square reader is a completely passive device that does no encryption -- it basically translates the signal on the magstripe into signal on the audio input jack. It is up to the software running on the iPad to capture this "audio signal", interpret it as magstripe data, decode the signal, and send it to a payment gateway.
If the 2X app is what's running on the iPad, it would need to do all of the translation and then do keyboard emulation to "type" the card data into the tessitura payments screen; just like what happens when you use a keyboard emulation/wedge swipe on a PC. I'd be surprised if the 2X app had this capability.
What you'd really need to swipe cards into tessi through 2X on an iPad would be an iPad-compatible keyboard wedge-style magstripe reader. I don't believe any such device exists, but some research suggests it might be possible to frankenstein one together using the apple "camera adapter", a powered USB hub (running off of battery power, of course), and a standard USB keyboard emulation swipe.