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lawrencebillson / parkrun

parkrunPortable; stopwatch & barcode downloading software - runs on Kingston MLWG2 portable router
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Barcode Scanning with parkrunPortable #5

Closed lawrencebillson closed 8 years ago

lawrencebillson commented 8 years ago

The idea of using a cheap USB barcode scanner with parkrunPortable came up. This would have a couple of advantages.

It would cost very little ($20 - $40 per barcode scanner)

It would allow the use of barcode scanners that would read device screens - e.g. phones, or smartwatches.

Adding a USB hub should allow for more than one barcode scanner - e.g. for a busy parkrun where there are lots of tokens to scan.

I'm looking at adding this capability now and integrate into the 1.4 version of the front-end.

It looks like all that needs to be done is add the kmod-usb-hid package to the build; monitor dmesg for barcode scanners periodically, then read their data.

What do you think?

lawrencebillson commented 8 years ago

This is about 90% complete now and will be part of version 1.5 - it will automatically detect when one (or more) USB barcode scanners are plugged in. A barcode file will be generated for each scanner.

lawrencebillson commented 8 years ago

1.5 is up - USB barcode files are available in the normal downloads folder. I've tested it with 1-3 barcode scanners running at once.