What Kind of barcode am I decoding - (The easiest to decode ?- sorry ;-)
well I have already found a 3 of 9 bar code freeware font on the net and
that seemed to solve one part - getting the stickers for the books. unless
you suggest something otherwise.  they have nothing now and I could use
anything.

Now all I have to do is track down the wand, get a few pics and a
programmer, find a little free time....

All I have now is a basic stamp - it is NOT going have enough horsepower to
do this - I might use it to start out with to do some simple stuff for
testing.  But it looks like I'll need to go to assembly lang on a pic, 16c84
seems ubiquitious on the net, It seems to be fast enough, the one worry I
have if it has enough program space to get the job done.  The output from
this DIY project would be pc keyboard scan codes.  If I run out of
Space/time - it might be rs232 and i'll have to change the program I use for
the inventory to look at the serial port for the book code. I have seen
"wedges" with wands,but they cost 100+ dollars and for that money I can get
an awfull lot of parts.

-----Original Message-----
From: Walter Banks <walter@BYTECRAFT.COM>
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Date: Monday, September 15, 1997 12:44 AM
Subject: Re: Barcode and the PIC



>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?)
>

I'll look that up in the library - I supose that it is out of print - if not
an ISBN number would be nice.

>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