Kahn-Syd wrote:
>
> I have been bitten hard by the PIC bug.  And since there
> is no better way to learn than by doing - I want to build
> a PIC based barcode decoder for the church library.  That
> way they get a barcode scanner to help them out, I get
> to tell my wife I am doing this for a good cause and have
> a blast doing it.
>
> So before I have to re-invent the wheel - is there anywhere
> that I can look that has some tutorial/code/help/information
> or anything that will help me get pointed in the right direction...
>
> BTW - I do VB development for a living so the programming
> I understand, just the algorithms sometime are hard to figure
> out.

First what type of barcode are you using?

All barcodes have three things in common.
  1) Calibration information
  2) Clocking information
  3) Data.

Most barcode formats also use the size of
the space between bars for some purpose.

Many years ago Carl Helmers, Ralph Trueblood and I
wrote a book on barcode technology. The book was titled
"Contempory applications of barcode technology" It
contained some simple barcode reader code. The code
in the book was all written in Pascal and was designed
to run on an Apple ][ (Did I say it was a while ago?)

PIC's should not have any trouble reading hand wand
code.

One assumption that is useful is to remember the
fastest measured speed of a hand held wand was
42in/sec  (~1m/sec)

Walter Banks
http://www.bytecraft.com