Notices

My apologies if this has been covered earlier in the thread.

I own a bar and I wanted to use mbarcode to do the stocktake in the bar. But it appears to have big problems with barcodes on bottles that are on horizontally. Vertically is no problem at all.

So I think mbarcode has trouble dealing with barcodes that are on something round.

Any setting I could change to improve on this?

It works lightening fast on flat barcodes on my phone, great program there!

The 1D scanner has problems with fuzzy edges, which is what you tend to get with barcodes wrapped around bottles and therefore at different distances.

This is something that needs to be improved in the libzbar library which decodes these barcodes. In the short term you might have more luck changing the distance at which you can the label (depth of field might change with focal distance, but I don't know whether it does)

Sorry I can't do anything specific to help here other than to point you to http://zbar.sourceforge.net/ to request an enhancement, etc.

i remember an app that a friend had on his android device.
he scanned the bar codes from a cereal package, choc bar and all other kind of stuff, the device then opened a site that showed him all kind of information (nutrition info, price, where to get cheapest etc)

will such connection be available für mbarcode too anytime?

i tried scanning some codes, all i ended up with was the numbered code being shown by the program, if anything.

Write a plugin, it's nice and easy!

You could use the weblookup plugin to do a web search for the caode in question. I'm currently working (slowly) on an item database app which will perform auto-lookups and allow you to save items (e.g. lists of books, DVDs, shopping list), but going a bit slow atm due to work and broken N900.

ItemDB in Garage. Help welcome

Thanks for mbarcode! I am writing a small Python plugin to manage my grocery list.

I ran into a problem however. When, in my plugin, I try to import some other python modules I get undefined references errors when the wrapper evals the code. For example, if I import datetime, I get undefined reference for _Py_ZeroStruct.

I did some digging and it seems to be related to this bug:
http://bugs.python.org/issue4434. It has to do with modules that use Python's dynamic loader not listing the dynamic loader as dependency. According to that ticket, it has been "fixed" in later versions of Python.

I used the workaround listed in the ticket in your python wrapper (dlopen of libpython2.5.so.1) and it resolves my issue. You may want to include this in wrapper, at least until the python version on the N900 increases to a new version (if ever).

I've included a patch for your convenience if you want to use it.

Thanks again!

Nice one, I'll do some testing and add it in tonight

Just a quick note to all plugin developers. The API has changed a bit, removing the isReady() function and replacing with a isReady() signal that is emitted whenever your plugin is ready to return some results. This avoids a bad timer we needed to use earlier.

This will cause some hickups for all who update mbarcode from extras-devel within the next 24 hours, but I'm trying to fix all errors as soon as possible. Please report back here if you find anything in particular.

For those of you who are developing, you can see a sample plugin in the SVN repo using the new API:
https://garage.maemo.org/plugins/scm...=maemo-barcode

Thanks for the reply!

One more question,

for the stocktaking I need to scan barcodes and then add a number. Like a bottle of Jack Daniels with only half left I'd put 0,5 behind the barcode.

I want to do this in excel for starters. Is there a plugin, or option that I've missed that will put the first barcode I scan in a predetermined cell (like always start in B6) and then the next one under it, etc etc? Or anything like it?

I have no experience with programming but otherwise I'll have to give the API a shot.

I'd go for a Python plugin which has a numeric edit field that you can fill in, then just write the data to a csv file so you can import it into Excel.

Updated Python plugin (with patch and Dragly's updated plugin api) will come this evening probably - I need to check whether signals emitted on the Python side are correctly received back in the C++ code, and if not will need to decide on a work-around.