On Jan 28, 2008, at 2:57 PM, James Newton wrote:
> I'm still really interested to hear from anyone who does barcode  
> readers:
> Can an LED be used to generate a pattern of light and dark that a  
> barcode
> wand would see as if it were a barcode?

Previous copy of this reply didn't seem to have gotten through:
==========

There's no way it could be done with 100% compatibility.

It would likely work with wands that have to be manually swiped  
across the barcode, IF the LED color matched the wand's sensor.  Red  
show work for many, however there are some wands that use IR - the  
idea being that they can also read barcodes that have been concealed  
by overprinting with an IR-transparent ink.  I have no idea how  
common IR wands are.

Non-contact scanners that use a linear CCD array would have no chance  
at all of reading anything from a single LED.

The scanners (typically gun-shaped) that use a laser and rotating  
mirror fall somewhere in the middle - they could work, but it's also  
possible that they're doing something like synchronizing their  
decoding with the mirror rotation.


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