Card transaction terminal

Claim 1

A circuit for a low cost, easily manufacturable card transaction terminal for reading a magnetic stripe on a data card, said circuit being mountable in a card terminal housing, comprising: a single double-sided printed circuit board having a first side and a second side and a plurality of mounting holes; an alphanumeric liquid crystal display (LCD) device affixed to said first side; a single chip liquid crystal display driver circuit responsive to control signals for causing said LCD to display alphanumeric information; bracket means having a plurality of twistable fasteners for extending through some of said mounting holes in said circuit board and for holding said liquid crystal display to said first side; a plurality of keypad electrical contacts formed on said first side, said keypad contacts being positioned to make an electrical circuit when contacted by a bridging conductive pellet on a keypad membrane associated with said card terminal housing; and a plurality of circuit components all affixed to said second side, said circuit components consisting essentially of: a nonvolatile electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) circuit for storing predetermined operational parameters for said circuit; a single chip modem circuit; data access arrangement circuitry for connecting said modem circuit to an external telephone line; a magnetic stripe read head interface circuit connected to an external magnetic stripe read head, said circuit comprising a single integrated circuit containing a plurality of operational amplifiers and a plurality of external components for setting of parameters for said operational amplifiers, said interface circuit providing self clocking signals corresponding magnetic signals read from a magnetic stripe card swiped against the external read head; a single chip microcomputer circuit including an internal mask-programmed read only memory for storage of a software program for said microcomputer circuit, said microcomputer circuit being operative for receiving operator input command signals from said keypad electrical contacts, for converting said self clocking signal into data corresponding to information encoded on the magnetic card without interim storage of said self clocking signals, for controlling communications with a host system via said modem circuit, and for providing said control signals to said liquid crystal display driver circuit; and said circuit components including no memory components other than said EEPROM and memory internal to said single chip microcomputer.