Comment by moyta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moyta | Hacker News Reader

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He definitely could do a better job explaining what he is trying to accomplish, but I pity the person who has to use the barcode scanner he suggested, when you go below the $100 price point and are looking for a new in box handheld scanner, there is just crap for options and you will get to sit there and try to scan the same item repeatedly, until you give up and key every 8th item in by hand.

I would highly recommend buying a used Metrologic or Datalogic handheld scanner at or above $50, it'll work a lot better and (if programmed) can usually handle 2D barcodes. This is the major reason you see Fred Meyers spending $5k a pop on new Datalogic 9800i's, and why Walmart had the NCR 7878 custom built for them, scanning performance is a make it or break it deal.

On the Pi side, I'd sub in a OrangePi Plus 2E since it has 16GB of eMMC and has a fully libre stack now at a lower cost, and would likely nab a used monitor for $10 locally rather than pay for a low res 7" at a premium price.

Thank you! I definitely will explain it better/in more detail.

Thank you for the advice with the hardware, I'm not yet too familiar with the hardware side, but I'm learning and your feedback is really important to me, thank you.

I tested the barcode scanner with quite a few products and thought it to be pretty good for the money. I mean, for me it's a personal thing, so no need for super high performance. If the item is already in the system, you can scan 2-3 times per second, which is pretty good i think.

I'll definitely look up the PI and monitor part thank you !

> you go below the $100 price point and are looking for a new in box handheld scanner, there is just crap for options

Disagree. I have a very similar barcode scanner[1] to manage my book library, and it works perfectly over 99% of the time. It also scans every type of barcode I've thrown at it.

The bigger problem is grocery box designers who think it's funny to print the barcode onto dark backgrounds - I think that's where the el-cheapo scanners struggle.

Instead of investing in a tethered scanner, wouldn't a better option be to use a smartphone camera and an app?

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[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/My-Link-Barcode-Scanner-Reader-Read...

(Out of stock now, but I think it cost me ~£30 [$37])

Could you provide a reference for your claim that the OrangePi Plus 2E has a fully libre stack? I was under the impression that it used out-of-tree kernel patches and binary blobs, which Wikipedia confirms.

I'm looking for any such (fully libre, no blobs, not even in firmware) hardware, but I haven't found anything so far except for some heavily modified old Thinkpads running Libreboot (sold by a vendor with shit customer support, as in delivering months late and not communicating for weeks at a time).

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