Configure card printer timeout

This article is added for Smart ID 23.10.5.

This article describes how to configure the timeout before the card encoding starts, to ensure that the card is ready to be configured.

When a printer is used to do PKI encoding, typically the card will first be printed and then moved to the printer's chip card reader for the PKI encoding. Identity Manager will detect the card as soon as it is there and start encoding.

If the card is not inserted in the card reader correctly, for example, the card may be inserted upside down, it will not be possible to encode it. Identity Manager will keep waiting for the card to be inserted correctly. By default, it will wait for 5 seconds. After that, the encoding of this card will fail and the process can continue.

Due to their PKCS#11 implementations, when using CardOS API or Idemia middleware, Identity Manager cannot always distinguish whether a card was inserted correctly and can be used, or not. In rare cases, this can lead to errors detecting a card when encoding cards with a printer's internal card reader.

Timeout configuration

The timeout can be configured by using the keyword CardWaitTimeout in the description section of the encoding description. Here you can set the amount of milliseconds Identity Manager will wait for a card to be inserted to a printer's integrated card reader.

Note that the waiting time starts after previous steps, like printing, have already finished.

Example: Timeout configuration

In the following example, the timeout is reduced to 1 second (1000 ms):

[Encoding]
Type=1024,Chip
Devices=8710
(...)
[Description]
CardWaitTimeout=1000
(...)