Anyone know of hardware or software solution for N800 that would allow scanning of barcodes and/or isbn numbers as text input to the N800 Xterm? I suppose the solution would involve a bluetooth scanner but any other ideas out there?

I only have a 770, but they released a camera app recently for the N800, so maybe you could hack something together if that app has a command-line mode.

I doubt the camera would be able to read barcodes... In order to read a bar code you need a laser scanner. So discard the camera idea.

There are several programs for camera equipped cellular phones which scan barcodes and then do online lookups of pricing databases. That said, the camera on the N800 is quite simply awful.

d00d they dont "scan" bar codes they take a snap shoot of the numerical code and submite it to a online DB.

Don't call me a liar. I have personally seen several cell phone based apps that "scan" both 1 and 2d b&w barcodes. That they do so by capturing an image with the camera rather than using a lightwand or laser makes no difference. There are also several companies involved in creating their own proprietary systems (often incorporating color blobs) that work better given the limitations of most camera phones and poor alignment by the operator. Neomedia's Qode Smartcodes is one such system. Nextcode does traditional barcodes optically as well as has their own systems.

Who the hell call you a liar? Get off that trip! You said it your self it takes a picture of the bar code.

Hey Guys

Actually you are both kinda correct.

A laser barcode scanner is not a lot more than a camera in this case. It is just reading the reflected light from the barcode pattern. A digital camera also reads said light.

It is the processing that goes on behind the reader where the smarts are.

In the case of a barcode laser scanner it is normally either a POS till and in the digital camera scenario a purely software based application.

There are plenty of software based barcode "decryptors" out there. With 1D bar codes they are translating the code into a numerical form which is then used to look something up in a DB. With a lot of the 2D barcodes the actual information can often be encoded into the barcode itself.

Getting back to the original question. As yet I have to find a barcode decryptor for the N800 (and I really really want one for a project I am working on). There are several out there for the mobile platform, including Windows Mobile, J2ME and a couple of Series 60 specific apps.

I have heard there are a couple of QRCode readers for Linux, so if someone fancies looking them out and recompiling/debugging for the N800 let me know.

BarneyC

c00l... The original poster mention bluetooth for a actual scaner. So I was going that way

Barcode reading with "webcams" is doable (see the Mac app Delicious Monster) but the image has to be pretty good... A lot of codes (particularly 2d codes) are built so that they can be scanned even with TERRIBLE cameras, take a glance at the QR code explosion in japan and you'll get a general idea of how popular it is. That being said, I'm pretty sure that the camera on the N800 (as terrible as it is) would probably work to pull some barcodes, in good light, with clever image processing...