Barcoding and RF Scanners

[pauloconnor]

hi all,

Just looking for some direction here.

Looking to develop a system, very quickly the bones of which are as follows:

Production: Production of weighed barcoded product in factory environment. Production details transferred to main database. Will be a touchscreen-based app.

Despatch: Ability to place barcoded product onto Pallets for despatch.

Office: Creation of products, orders etc.

Now, development of the applications is no problem. Main concerns I have are.

i) Barcoding - need to produce a barcode for printing on a product label. This will need to be done through Progress code. Anyone have any suggsestions on how this can be achieved?

ii) Scanning at despatch. Will need some rugged scanners, probably RF. Anyone have any experience with RF scanners or have any suggestions. Also, anyone know if it is possible to run GUI code on an RF scanner.

If anyone has any pointers or sources of info on this, it'd be greatly appreciated.

 

[Luke Gardiner]

All barcode scanners I've come across work by emulating the keyboard, hence if focus is on a textfield and you scan something then the barcode appears in the field. Most scanners are also programmable to some degree, so you can specify how the barcode data is sent. What we did is have our scanner send F15 before and after the barcode, since F15 cannot be generated using the keyboard, we know that whatever is between the F15's is the barcode. I used a keyboard hook ocx to stop the keypress events from reaching progress, and then when the last F15 arrives I raise a "barcode event", which is then handled on the progress side of things. This allows the user to scan something anywhere in the application and cause a window to pop up.

Producing barcodes can be done in two ways, either find a barcode font or draw them yourself. I found the standards for Code-128 at www.ean.com.au which basically says how thick the lines and spaces are, and then wrote some progress code to draw lines in a postscript document.