Ruby and Barcode Readers
Posted by tom June 5th, 2007
Today I finally “cracked” the Peninsula BlackBird II Portable Memory Barcode Reader communication protocol (using RS232 via USB) and wrote a Ruby class to read the scans from it. I got some help, from a PDF describing the protocol, but the PDF was very, very meager (to keep things polite). Nonetheless, I’m happy the guys over at Peninsula were kind enough to provide me with it.
Earlier I already wrote a Ruby class to read the scans from the IntelliScanner Mini. For that scanner however (which is actually a Symbol CS1504) is more than enough English documentation available.
Next on the todo list is to retrieve timestamps on each scan (I still need to investigate whether that is actually possible) from the Blackbird. And later, finish the code on the Mini.
Generating EAN13 Barcodes with Rails
Posted by tom June 3rd, 2007
Today I wrote code which generates EAN-13 Barcodes from Ruby/Rails, with the help of RMagick and ImageMagick. There already was a barcode-gem but that just generated Code39 Barcodes. Based on the code in that gem, better said: following the conventions in that code I created a class which now is capable of generating EAN-13 PNG images:
Why do I do such things? Well, it’s part of my new pet project: Barcodes on Demand