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Comment by writeslowly | Hacker News Reader

What are the use cases for the advertised barcode reader accessory that appears to shoot the laser out the side of your laptop?

https://connect.na.panasonic.com/toughbook/accessories/fz-vb...

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Inventory / part tracking comes to mind.

The barcode scanner drops the likelihood of typos in part and serial numbers

I've heard it said that an airplane is ten thousand parts flying in formation: keeping track of maintenance and replacement parts is important in many (safety-critical) industries, and so having a scanner that one doesn't have to remember, lug around, and fumble with [0] could be useful.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=barcode+scanner

Government procurement contracts for these probably wanted it since they need a way to inventory assets and this gives an all-in-one solution. Military and law enforcement are probably the main purchasers of these.

15 years ago, if you were a delivery company you might use something like a Panasonic Toughbook CF-U1 in each van. Rugged, built-in GPS and 3G, and it runs a full copy of Windows XP. You want a dashboard-mounted docking station? How about a docking station designed for 100,000 connect-disconnect cycles?

The barcode scanner, believe it or not, was useful to scan barcodes.

These days a smartphone is a much better choice.

Not for scanning barcodes; I've seen them in action, they're noticeably slower and the image processing seems more involved than whatever magic is in barcode scanners.

You can also get "smartphones" (Android handhelds) with a true laser scanning barcode reader. We have them at work. Like Zebra devices.

They sure beat camera based ones yes (although they technically also use a camera but it's really optimised for the purpose)

Most of the couriers that come to my door also use these or similar, not standard smartphones.

The barcode scanning in the Libib app (an app to keep track of books) seems quite fast, it is quite addictive to just zap the barcodes and see the book data added to the catalog.

It seems comparable to the laser based scanners used at library checkouts for example.

The magic is just software. There are extremely fast barcode scanning libraries available, e.g. Scandit.

To a degree, the dedicated barcode scanners is still a fair bit faster. So anything dealing with high volumes of barcodes like warehousing inventory or store stock management benefits from a dedicated scanner.

I work on Public Safety applications. Tracking the chain of custody for items collected by officers is very important. Many vendors have support for this. Officers can print labels from their car and begin maintain a custody log from out in the field. Officers can scan labels with barcode scanners or phone cameras. They also often use barcode scanners to scan drivers licenses with can have 1D or 2D information encoded in them.

To read barcodes

One possible use case would be for police officers to scan driver licenses when pulling people over. When I worked for a city IT department, they had to have separate barcode readers installed in the cars for that, so I imagine it'd be nice to have it integrated into the laptop.

It may be redundancy; have a dedicated reader but if it breaks you don’t need to go to the station for another one.

Probably a fair number of document, media, or small part inventory tasks where the laptop would be on cart. Sometimes easier to bring the barcode to the scanner than bring the scanner to the barcode.

It's for public safety / law enforcement use cases. ID cards like driver's licenses have a barcode on them, they can read the barcode in their police software to look you up and get your warrants, driving record, etc and digitally ticket you.

For Public Safety usage most all ID’s now have at least a 1d barcode and most have a 2d barcode. When the usage environment permits their use, barcode readers permit quick and accurate data entry versus manual keyboard entry.

Inventory tracking. This is a piece of military equipment, and a lot of that stuff is tracked with bar codes.

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