pyhandscanner

About

pyhandscanner connects to serial hand-held barcode scanner and print the bar-code to stdout.

History

I own a Metrologic MS9535 Bluetooth hand-held scanner, the scanner connects to a base-station via Bluetooth, the base station is then connected via USB to the computer. Recently the base-station failed and the scanner was useless. I decided to connect the scanner directly to the computer via Bluetooth and bypass the base-station. I wrote this script to read the output of the scanner and display it to the focused windows (console, libreoffice, ...). This should also work with serial scanners.

Requirements

• Bluetooth or serial scanner
• optional: Bluetooth stack (bluez)
• optional: Bluetooth dongle
• crikey software installed (used to display the bar-code to the focused windows)

Install

Ubuntu

Install crikey:

sudo apt-get install libx11-dev x11proto-xext-dev libxt-dev libxtst-dev
cd /usr/src
sudo wget http://www.shallowsky.com/software/crikey/crikey-0.8.3.tar.gz
sudo tar zxvf crikey-0.8.3.tar.gz
cd crikey-0.8.3
sudo make
sudo make install

test crikey (should write "hello" in the console):

crikey "hello" 

download pyhandscanner:

git clone https://[email protected]/xens/pyhandscanner.git

copy and make pyhandscanner executable:

cd pyhandscanner
cp pyhandscanner /usr/local/bin
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/pyhandscanner

test:

pyhandscanner -d /dev/yourSerialPort

Bluetooth specific

Scan the Bluetooth devices and scan the available options for the device:

xens@testvm:~$  hcitool scan
Scanning ...
    00:0C:A7:00:90:6C	VoyagerBT 5604210356


xens@testvm:~$ sdptool browse 00:0C:A7:00:90:6C
Browsing 00:0C:A7:00:90:6C ...
Service Name: Serial Port
Service RecHandle: 0x10000
Service Class ID List:
  "Serial Port" (0x1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 1

So here it's the channel 1

edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf and put the following (with your settings):

rfcomm0 {
	bind yes;
	device 00:0C:A7:00:90:6C;
	channel	1;
	comment "Metrologic Voyager";
}

restart the bluetooth services:

/etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

rfcomm should return the following:

rfcomm0: 00:0C:A7:00:90:6C channel 1 closed