Thinking Cashier
Computer based point of sale
Thinking Cashier is a computer expansion card that I invented and authored the software that that it will use to run. My father, Lior Dor, designed the electronics and PCB board. We then developed and manufactured it. This was a commercially successful project, but my greatest gain was a personal one: being able to work with my father on technical matters and travel with him as we built the company's supply chain and manufacturing process. Few are that lucky.
The Thinking Cashier PCB transforms a regular PC to a smart Point Of Sales (POS). Thinking Cashier provided hardware interfaces to cash drawer, 40-column printer, shopper LCD display, external power supply, a secure safe-locked non-volatile memory and real-world clock that prevented date and time manipulations according to IRS regulations.
The safe-locked memory held encrypted data that was not accessible, or viewable unless a key is provided; even after opening the lock the data it held is not present as a file on disk and thus is not amenable even to external hacking tools that can access typical areas of memory. Similarly, the regular computer system's clock can be deliberately changed by the user, but the real-world clock we developed allowed the Thinking Cashier to use our clock services and override the regular computer clock.
Technologies:
- C
- Btrieve file system
- Dallas Semiconductors DS1307
- Dallas Semiconductors DS1210