Well the camera stuff works (scan, recognise, decode), it's just the GUI, database and web scraping stuff that I have to finish off.

It works reasonably well with the N810 I have handy atm (with camera facing the wrong way) so should work ok with the N800 too. Needs plenty of light mind you as the cameras are not that great.

Give me a few days and I'll try to get something half usable out.

I've thought of this kind of thing before too, and it sounds great!

I know there's a Palm Treo program that does it too. Hmm... I wonder if it would work on the Garnet emulator?

Thanks dgec for reminding me about this...

OK, few days given

Yeah ok, well the GUI is pretty much usable, just searching for some last bugs.

You're welcome to compile it for yourselves of course, and help with the debugging

Few more days, sorry! (busy week this week)

Not sure if this helps, but there is a website that you can send photo's of barcodes and it will read it and send the info back. My hunch is google, but might not have been. I saw the info here on ITT, the rest of the thread had more ideas apparently the zxing project could be compiled for local use?

You might be able to build an app that automates capturing and sending the image to that website. It would be an interesting addition to knips, the photo capturing program.

The recognition code already works fine on device, no need to send off an image. The question is really how to obtain useful data about the EAN/UPC code from online.

I was playing around with dmtxread from the Ubuntu Jaunty repos on the weekend. I was trying to take a picture of a 2D barcode with the tablet's camera and then use dmtxread to find out what the barcode said.

The results were disappointing. The biggest problem is the tablet's camera. It doesn't focus when you get close to the barcode, so I could get a readable picture of a big 10x10 code on a toothpaste tube, but I couldn't get a clear picture of the code on the inside of my second tablet or the codes being used on preprinted postage in Canada. I even used Gimp (again, on the tablet ) to increase the contrast and sharpen the image, but the source image was just too poor...

Frustrating!

There may be ways around that, assuming there's enough lighting to produce sufficient contrast. I've not tried the dtmx code (see the test app in the maemo-barcode SVN) recently, but plan to add that in once I've sorted out the wonders of GStreamer (uuurgh!).

Are there any GStreamer gurus about? The video display widget is going blank when I change notebook page and then change back (I've created pages for the scan window, the database window, etc).

I also experimented with adding in a callback to prevent data being passed down the data analysis part of the Tee, but it seems to stop all data from being passed.

Still some learning to be done

If anyone has any bright ideas/code about scanning the interweb once we have an EAN or ISBN number please speak up as currently all one can do is save the EAN/ISBN without any description.

ISBN.nu seems to be what you're looking for.
Also, check out this site - he was writing an app to use the CueCat to scan books with, and kept notes on parts of his labors.
Most of his comments are out of date, but they might still be useful.

David

This evening I was trying to figure out what film to watch and I thought 'what I need is a barcode scanning app to catalogue my dvd's on my n810' and lo a short search later and I find a project that looks close to delivering what I want. any news on a binary to download? or is it still a case of grabbing from svn and compiling myself?