For all you obsessive-compulsive types out there who need to keep track of every single box of paper clips and old Popular Mechanics magazines crammed into your overstuffed desk drawers, Max's App Note Blog has posted an easy way to categorize your useless swag with a do-it-yourself touch-screen
barcode scanner. Little more than a standard commercial touch-screen attached to a Metrologic Voyager scanner with a RS232 null-modem cable (instructions for building your own are included), this project has all sorts of practical applications, from making sure the nano you just bought isn't some
cheap knockoff to giving your kids a head start on the technology they'll need to master in order to become successful grocery store cashiers. And if for some reason you fall upon hard times and are forced to sell off most of your possessions, the touch-screen barcode scanner will make your fire sale look that much more professional to the folks snatching up your treasured gear at insultingly low prices.
[Via
Make]
posted Aug 13th 2006 12:30PM
cool i guess
1
um useless way to spend my time.... Back to my video games I guess.
Holy crap... $700 in parts just to put a barcode on a small screen? And with what purpose? Get yourself a $10 cuecat off ebay and you've pretty much got the same... Even the application they show is useless, at the very least they could have made it pull up the product name from the UPC database...
Great lines.
"giving your kids a head start on the technology they'll need to master in order to become successful grocery store cashiers. "
"look that much more professional to the folks snatching up your treasured gear at insultingly low prices."
Are you kidding? As always, the humor in this article on Engadget is wicked annoying and just not funny.
>>Are you kidding? As always, the humor in this article on Engadget is wicked annoying and just not funny.
I found it funny. But that has nothing to do with the large payslip I get in the mail every week from your favourite tech blog.
Hell, the wit in the article was more interesting than the $700 scanner.
It'd be so much more interesting to just use a webcam and program some software to read the barcode. Ex. Delicious Library
I am amazed at how expensive these parts are. More amazing is the guy who had the money to waste on them.
I had no idea those wireless Bluetooth scanners from Wegmans were over $500...
Yes, barcode readers are expensive. But the good side is that you can connect the to your computer, so you don't actually have to build anything extra.
I can't believe I actually waisted my time clicking on the Gmail news link. What a rip.
So of you think its funny (I DO) and some of you dont. But what is up with the bottle of jagermeister next to the coke?
I love the small bottles of Jager and Coke in the picture. Good to know that now you can inventory your liquor stash with precision.
Cool, this is the poor-man's barcoding. Mom n' pop shops all over the world can have their very own barcoding system
What a great idea, my father needs something like this.
Thou at times I think his brain is like a barcode scanner
He could tell I had touched something on his desk as it was a mm out of place.
I AM MAKING MY OWN BARCODE FOR MY FIRST DVD AND THE BOOKS I HAVE ARE OLD, PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE IS AN SPECIFIC NUMBER ASSIGNED FOR DVDs (LIKE IT IS THE NUMBER 2 FOR CDs)
THANKS!
CECILIA