Encoding Mifare^® Smart Cards

Encoding Mifare^® Smart Cards is performed during the printing process.  When the main print configuration set-up dialog appears, dialog boxes towards the bottom right allow control of the encoding process.  The dialog area looks like:

If Encode Only is selected, the card will not be printed, but will be passed through the printer for encoding.  (Note: for this to work on some printers it is necessary to also set the printer driver for encoding only or for magnetic card encoding.)

When printing is started the card is drawn into the printer for encoding.  The software expects it to arrive there within 5 seconds or an error occurs.  A progress bar dialog appears when the card is being programmed and the length of time this takes depends upon the number of blocks being programmed.

Any errors which occur during programming will be announced in a pop-up window.  They will also be logged to a file called mifare.err in the same directory as the badge .IDC file.

Programming a factory-fresh the Mifare^® card should not cause errors as long as the correct factory keys have been entered during the configuration process.  However, attempts to re-program a card will meet with varying success depending upon the access conditions currently set in the card and the correctness of the keys defined for the sector.  It is possible to set access conditions so that block values and/or access conditions can never been changed.