Geek Warning, was Re: plant auction pre-board notes

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, DonaldR wrote:

> I don't have a laptop but would like to volunteer again to man a
> computer.  What kind of bar code readers will we get.  I remember some
> of the old "Mousey" looking ones didn't always work easily?
> -Don Rudee

Oh boy are you in for a treat Don.  I have been scouring EBay and becoming
a regular barcode FREAK in the last couple months, and now have a small
arsenal consisting of four "gun-style" laser scanners and two CCD-based
scanners.  Most of these plug into the keyboard port on the laptop (like
the crappy cuecats did).  Some laptops had problems with these "keyboard
wedge" devices and required an actual keyboard to be plugged in as well.  
So voila!  I found a deal on small numeric keypads, four for about $10, so
problem solved.  Some computers don't have keyboard ports anymore, so I
found some cheap USB keyboard adapters.

The other two scanners plug into the serial port (RS-232), but I've 
written a tiny utility that turns them into keystrokes, so in reality 
those two have less bulky hardware to deal with.

Oh, another cool thing I added was that the labels now include a 
"checksum" character which reduces the odds of mistyping a label number 
should a scanner not be working.  So in last year's system, you could type 
"G1023" to get generic item 1023 entered.  But if you typed "G1024" by 
mistake it took it just fine.  Now there's an extra letter at the end 
that's different for each item, so it might be "G1023B" but if you entered 
"G1024B" it will say that it's an invalid number.  

Anyway, my hopes here are that we'll solve the remaining little bit of
mis-entered information.  At a minimum, I'm sure more little kids will 
want to run the computers so they can use the laser guns to scan 
everything.

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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