Notices

Just to move the discussion from the various threads into a central one for further discussion.

For the previous threads see here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...=11032&page=74 post #734 onwards.

And here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...hlight=barcode

And here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...hlight=barcode

Probably others, if so, please list them. Anyway, it appears that there are a number of nice opensource libraries/pieces of code to do decoding, so hopefully it should be possible to get something up and running without having to do all the interesting image processing ourselves (though I'm sure all these libs will need tweaking/patches, so don't worry those of you like me who like that sort of thing )

Anyway, these look like likely suspects for our decoder codes:

http://www.geocities.com/ooosawaddee3pdf417/
Does:
pdf417 barcodes

http://zebra.sourceforge.net/
Does:
EAN-13/UPC-A
EAN-8
Code 128
Code 39
Interleaved 2 of 5

http://www.libdmtx.org/ and http://oss.devit.com/datamatrix/
Does:
Data Matrix barcodes

So, that's a reasonable selection of barcode decoders that it should be possible to plumb into an app.

Camera info here: http://maemo.org/development/documen..._api_bora.html

So, what should this application be able to do? Your thoughts?

I was thinking that pointing it at a bar code, it should tell us what type the barcode is (this may need some tweaking, as most of the mentioned libs just decode one type, so we'd need to either manually select in the first instance (just to get it up and running) or have the software decide (the ideal solution)). It should then tell us what the barcode has encoded in it (be it an URL, ISBN number, Universal Product Code (UPC).

Then once we have this info, I suppose it should do something with it: Allow us to send the URLs to the browser to open, list which manufacturer code is in the UPC (this data is available afaik, but what product is up to the manufacturer, so this may be more tricky), or what the title of the book is from the ISBN (this service is available on the web).

So, what do people think, worth a try? Anyone fancy helping out?

Cheers,

Simon

Well, I only glanced at the threads so I don't know if this possible use for it has been mentioned before but here I go: one application that comes to my mind right away is bill payment. At least here (Finland), bills you get in the mail almost always (if sent by a large company) have a barcode in them. That barcode can be used for entering all the bill information automatically at an ATM machine - or well, the "bill payment ATM machines" that have a barcode reader for paying bills, that is.

But nobody I know really uses those old ATM machines with barcode readers anymore, people just pay bills home using their online banking, and so the barcode has pretty much become useless for ordinary people. Most of us are left with no option but to type the amount, account number and an often ridiculously long reference number (something like xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx) manually when we receive a bill. So having an app that would just read the barcode and either (a) fill out the information to your web page or (b) (the more realistic option and implementable option, probably) lay out the different info on a screen where they could be easily copied into your netbank page could be very useful.

Maybe it would be possible to have the scanner program read a bill and then show it and assing a different shortcut key for pasting each line it reads? So that you'd read the barcode and end up with a layout like this:

(alt+1): account no
(alt+2): payee
(alt+3): amount
etc.

and then you could just move to your online bank page and fill out stuff by using those shorcuts for pasting the different information...I don't know if this is possible but it would make paying bills with the tablet pretty handy. Anyway, doing online banking here would at least be something that could use a nice barcode reader. Are barcodes used in bills in other countries by the way?

Unfortunately I'll be of no use here. The highlight of my coding skills was making a line of Commodore 64's Basic fill the screen with my name

I can't see why it wouldn't work, the only question is what format are the barcodes in question - are they one of the formats supported by the libs listed above?

Is the a web page somewhere that explains how these particular barcodes work?

I did some surfing and they seem to be these barcodes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_128

So the Zebra you mentioned above would appear to support that barcode. If you'd like, I'd be happy to scan and send you an old electric bill or something later tonight, so you can take a look.

No rush, let me hack together an app which uses Zebra (and the others) and then we can see what it spits out.

As a first step, I would be content with an app that scans the barcodes reliably with the camera, and writes them to a text file. I could then use the code list on the PC with apps that know what to do with them (like a book catalog with ISBNs, etc.)...

I would love to see this app too; but the camera (at least on the N800) doesn't seem to be up to snuff in terms of handling barcodes/text. That would be part of what I'd love to see in the next major tablet though.

Interesting idea but I have doubts that the camera would come close to doing bar codes reliably. You want to bounce a light off the code and read the reflection on the fly vs store a camera pic and then try to read it afterward. I haven't done bar codes for many years but there should be some USB devices out there that might work. I did this decades ago with a TRS80 and a VIC-20 and those were much less powerful devices than the N8x. (1MHz with 3KB RAM if I remember)

This was discussed in several of the earlier threads and some people mentioned that they had gotten various USB/Bluetooth scanners to work IIRC.

However, several people also pointed out that the PalmOS devices have a barcode scanning/decoding program which uses the built in camera, so I don't see why we couldn't do it

My thoughts exactly