Jacob Yocom-Piatt wrote:
Dear Jacob,
That is very interesting question. I was always wondering myself if
it is possible to use those bar code scanners with OpenBSD.
Anyhow, this is what I found.
Obviously bar code scanners work completely differently than
Image scanners which are supported by sane-backends
http://www.sane-project.org/old-archive/2001-06/0111.html
The second thing I found is that they are not very hard for hacking
as they are essentially simple SCSI device. Somebody started
project in 2000
http://sourceforge.net/projects/uscan/
but never finished. It looks like people have been sued over those
drivers as it looks to me that those scanners are very lucrative
proprietary market.
Finally, it looks that might be a very simple hardware solution for you
http://www.readerware.com/rwbarcodespec.html
Look at on the bottom of the page. There is bunch of scanners that
should just work with OpenBSD. How? It looks to me that when you scan
the bar code this bar code gets memorized by the device and you can
mount device memory as SCSI drive or download via the network.
Sort of like USB memory stick or Digital camera.
I have not looked things very carefully so I might be very wrong.
I am really curious if you really get those things to work with Open.
Please keep me posted.
Most Kind Regards,
Predrag
does anyone on list know if wireless (e.g. bluetooth) barcode scanners
can or do work with openbsd? couldn't find much information about it
after searching.
the application is inventory tracking, etc, where several users would
concurrently scan and have barcodes register with a single machine. if
the devices simply spit out the barcodes over bluetooth, i expect
there is a way to achieve this.
cheers,
jake
