I’ve got a series of posts on JavaCard development. There is some hardware that is needed if you want to deploy your JavaCard programs to physical hardware. The cards that I’m using are both chip cards and dual-interface cards (meaning that they both have the chip and can communicate over NFC). They also have magnetic strips on the back. If you want to try the same hardware, this is a listing of what I’ve got. Note that the links in the following are affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I earn a small commission that goes towards supportin gthis site and my activities.

Blank Java Cards

Java 3 Dual Interface Cards

These are the cards on which I’ll be running my programs.

The JR150 cards are dual interface cards. They can interact both through the chip and wirelessly, making them accessible to Android phones. These cards use the smaller 6-contact version of the chip interface and a printable in card printers. The two that I received came with their keys on a sticker enclosed in the device. They key values were the same as what was listed on the Amazon Listing as example keys. I’m reposting here, should you get these cards and the if the same key applies. The cards come with at least 99 KB of storage and supports RSA encryption of up to 4096 bits.

CDKenc: 90379AЗE7116D455E55F9398736A01CA
CDKmac: 473F36161A7F7F60CC3A766EA4BE5247
CDKkek: D3749ED4FF42FD58B39EEB562B017CD9

Java 2 Chip Interface Cards

These cards *only* have the chip interface and are suitable for Java Card 2 applications. It has 40 kilobytes of storage and supports RSA encryption up to 2048 bits.

Card Readers

Contactless Only Card Reader

This inexpensive card reader/writer has a wireless-only interface. On Windows, no driver installation is needed. The operating system immediately recognizes it and makes it available to your programs.

Contac + Contactless Reader

This card reader cost a bit more than the wireless-only, but is able to read either type of card. Though it will be listed as two card readers by Windows, only one mode can be active at a time. It will either read a contactless card or a contact card, but not both at the same time. Like the previously mentioned card reader, the drives built into windows already works with this device.

Magnetic Reader/Writers

Text data can be encoded on the magnetic strips on the card. Note that the text data uses an encoding that does not make all ASCII characters available. The encoding for english letters doesn’t distinguish between upper and lower case letters. Card readers tend to return letters in upper case lettering.

Reader/Writer

If you want to also write information to the magnetic strip on the back of the card, you will want a card writer. Though, don’t put anything confidential on the magnetic card. Those contents tend to be stored in plain text and would easily be lifted by someone else.

Magnetic Reader

This magnetic reader has no capability for writing to a strip. To the computer, it appears as a keyboard. Swiping a card through it will result in the computer receiving keystrokes that correlate to the data on the card. You’ll need to parse the data out. I’ve written about the data encoding in another post that you can find here.

Card Skins

I checked out card printers, and even the cheapest among them is too expensive for handling a small volume of cards. So that my cards were not bear white, I decorated them using “card skins.” These are marketed as decorations for payment cards. I did add a few of these to a couple of payment cards too. At this point in time, the only information on the front of a card is a name and the name of a bank. Most of the relevant information is on the back of the card. If you get one, you’ll need to know if you are planning to place the skin on a card with the smaller 6-contact chip or the larger 8-contact. There exists an American Express with a 10-contact chip. I’ve not seen it in person and don’t know it’s size. If you have a 10-contact card, be aware that these skins might not fit. These are the cards that appear in my videos or my posts.

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