[Alexandria-list] CueCat scanners, was: Website

[Topher Cyll]

Hi folks,

I'm the author of userland cuecat code in Alexandria cvs.  It's been a
very long time, but here's what I can tell you.

Both the original kernel driver and my userland code are for
unmodified cuecats.  If you've defanged your cuecat you don't need any
special code since it will just output barcodes as plain text.

Unmodified cuecat input comes in as regular keyboard input, but it's
encoded.  There was a kernel driver that intercepted that data and
then passed it on up to userspace decoded, but it was brittle (and
never made the jump to 2.4 I think) and it was overkill anyways.

The "userland" code I submitted doesn't touch the kernel at all.  It
provides two Ruby methods, one that checks to see if a string looks
like cuecat input and one to translate a cuecat encoded string into a
barcode.

This is great for Alexandria, because all we needed to do for the UI
was to remove the character limit on the ISBN input field so that
cuecat input fits inside.  Then you just check to see if the input
looks like cuecat input before import and translate it into a barcode.

I actually found the cuecat to be a very reliable source of input,
especially if you provide good feed back to the user (a "good"
beep/"bad" beep, or a green or red flash or whatever) so they can
rescan if there were errors.

I may however, be the only the one who has ever successfully used the
userland cuecat code with Alexandria, because Laurent and I held off
committing my UI code changes because he was working on a revised GUI
at the time.

Anyways, it should be relatively easy to get working if someone is
interested, and I'd be happy to provide help.

The one concern (as someone pointed out) is that the cuecat sends
Alt-F10 before it sends the rest of it's encoding (the key combo was
designed to get the attention of the windows software the cuecats
originally shipped with).  If a window manager has bound an action to
that key pair, you can get some exciting results.  Of course, maybe
it's possible we could grab that hotkey to popup an Alexandria Add
Book window...?

Great to see Alexandria moving again!
Topher Cyll


On 4/10/07, Petr Vanek <vanous at penguin.cz> wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:45:47 -0400
> "Lissa Potter" <potter.lissa at gmail.com> (LP) wrote:
>
> LP> On 4/10/07, Joseph Method <tristil at gmail.com> wrote:
> LP> > But it was free right? Mine came in a box in the mail. I had no
> LP> > idea what it was, or what I would use it for, and eventually
> LP> > threw it away :(. I am thinking that we should replace the CueCat
> LP> > description with a plug for another barcode scanner that works
> LP> > with Linux, the way that Delicious Library sells a (very
> LP> > expensive) barcode scanner on their web page. Can anyone make a
> LP> > recommendation for a (preferably cheap) barcode scanner that
> LP> > works?
> LP>
> LP> The problem is that the CueCat is about the only cheap scanner out
> LP> there. There are a ton of different kinds of scanners, most over
> LP> US$100 used. Some attach via USB, some via PS2, some require
> LP> keyboard wedges, some are serial. Then there are the pen scanners,
> LP> which have never worked well.
>
>
> I would disagree. After similiar kind of discussions i got the CueCat
> long time ago. I got it working with 2.4 kernel and have to say that the
> result was terrible: i guess i had one correct scan out of five. After
> this I got a "regular" scanner through ebay for less than 30$ and am
> very happy ever since. This was about 18months ago. Currently I can
> administer my library without a choke when friends of mine come and get
> some books - one scan to get a book included into library, second
> scan to set it as borrowed. No second scanning, except when i have to
> switch keyboard to disable my Czech character on the numeric keys.
>
> If you have better results with the CueCat, lucky you :-)
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Petr
> -------------------------
> Petr Vanek
>
> mailto:vanous at penguin.cz
> http://vanous.penguin.cz
> http://biodynamika.cz
> -------------------------
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Alexandria-list mailing list
> Alexandria-list at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/alexandria-list
>