Hello all. For anyone interested my original intent was to communicate directly with these PcProx RF readers we have gotten from RFIDEAS. Their readers are configured to extract the information from the cards and send it to the thinclient as keystrokes. I wanted to speak directly to the device to negate the possibility of someone trying to bypass it with another input device. After scratching my head a little I had an A-Ha! moment. The PcProx readers can be configured to prepend or postpend characters to the card’s input. so I created a key to match my device input. It is now too easy. I create a password text box and hide it (still has to be visible to get focus) and create an event to give the text box focus to receive the reader’s input . I use a handy dandy Python slice to separate my key from the badge data then use a few conditionals to check first for illegal input devices(invalid key) and then for matching user with appropriate role in my authorization group. Simple yet effective enough for our needs for now. If anyone else has tried to use RFID scanners with their HMIs I would love to hear your solutions.