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copied!<p>Check out the <a href="http://www.javapos.com/docs.html" rel="noreferrer">JavaPOS</a> standard. I worked on this stuff a while back (for a pretty big company, name rhymes with allegorical :)) and used Hypercom credit card/debit swiper (also used to show the receipt to the user, capture signatures, and act as a PIN pad), IBM cash drawers, generic IBM-compatible PCs from a small supplier targeting the retail market (but any would do), thermal IBM printers, and a <a href="http://www.motorola.com/business/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=e37575489c075110VgnVCM1000008406b00aRCRD" rel="noreferrer">keyboard-shim barcode scanner</a>.</p> <p>All this stuff interfaced through JavaPOS compliant drivers and was not a big deal to handle for me, when at the time I had little-to-no experience controlling hardware.</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.visionpos.com/feat-pos-products-32-IBM4610.html" rel="noreferrer">printer</a> was pretty easy to interface and takes string input, or you can load a bitmap into it's memory to have it print out that (for a store logo).</p> <p>The <a href="http://www.hypercom.com/products/l4150.asp" rel="noreferrer">Hypercom pin pad/signature capture</a> was probably the most problematic to manage, with buggy firmware that required many workarounds.</p> <p>The <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/products/retail/products/peripherals/cashdrawers/" rel="noreferrer">cash drawer</a> had only two commands: one to pop it open and one to see if it was open.</p> <p>The trickier parts are not interfacing the hardware but rather ensuring <a href="https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/" rel="noreferrer">PCI compliance</a> and handling the cc processor backend. Also, usually you need to integrate with some sort of third party <a href="http://www.sap.com/usa/index.epx" rel="noreferrer">inventory</a>/<a href="http://quickbooks.intuit.com/" rel="noreferrer">sales management</a> package.</p> <p>EDIT:</p> <p>For .NET, the standard looks to be <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms828083.aspx" rel="noreferrer">POS for .NET</a>. I can't comment on device support for that. There is also OPOS which are some ActiveX controls (easily accessible from .NET) which claim to implement the same underlying standard as JavaPOS.</p>

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