
Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves - carrigan
https://bcarrigan.com/2018/04/20/wunderscan/
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tomxor
I love these little stories, they always make me want to go out and buy a
proper oscilliscope so I can start my own adventures.

I'm surprised by how simple and easy to understand the data serialisation is
on some bits of hardware as in this case.

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carrigan
Thank you for the kind words! I will echo slig and say that I have been really
happy with the Rigol DS1054Z so far. I love that you can build a really
capable electronics lab at home in 2018 for less than $500.

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joewee
Any guides in getting started with an oscilloscope?

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rasz
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTPhuRQBmLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTPhuRQBmLQ)

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pjc50
The laser scanner is kind of fancy, but you can get USB scanners for $10-$20
that present as keyboards. For me, the most interesting part of this is
looking at Elixir.

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mikevin
Do you have any recommendations? I've been looking to get one to play with the
same concept as this article but I've never pulled the trigger on buying one
as I'm not sure if there any quality aspects I need to be aware of. The
shipping costs for my location are a bit too much to just try one. I can also
imagine there's no real difference for that price range but I want to be sure
before I order one.

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notatoad
Getting whatever is the cheapest one Amazon has listed at any given time has
worked for me.

The only differentiation I can see is the really expensive ones can scan the
tiny 2d codes that are silkscreened on some ICs, and the cheap ones are
limited to about the same resolution that a standard consumer printer can
print a barcode at. Unless you have some very specialized requirements, you
should be good with just about any cheap barcode scanner.

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vxNsr
We've found Wunderlist to be truly amazing as a shopping list app, and my
family has been throwing this type of idea around for a while, though instead
of using a dedicated scanner we were thinking of just throwing together a
simple app that used the camera and available barcode reading software that
connected directly to our shopping list.

It's nice to see that someone else came up with this idea, executed it so
well.

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Moru
Most shoppinglist apps we tried when we were selecting our app had barcode
scanning but we never used it, it is far faster to just type twi chars and
select the too thing. Or just go thru the list of most used items.

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vxNsr
My problem with most of those apps is that they're too large and offer way
more features than we're interested in, often to the point that they break the
way we'd like to do things. Can you recommend an app that you use?

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himom
At first I thought it was going to be a :cueCat goes to rehab article, but
no... a legit barcode scanner. Nice!

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JonLim
Love this!

I was thinking of something similar, but mostly as an inventory + expiration
tracking system, because we often forget what we have in the fridge and
cabinets. I love the integration with Wunderlist for adding to the shopping
list as well!

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post_break
I would pay $100 for something like this. I want to just scan something, have
it beep, and add to a shopping list. I know amazon has something similar but I
don't want to order it, just log it. Excellent project.

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pjc50
The Android app "Out of Milk" will do this for free using the phone's camera.

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froindt
How good is the scanning speed? I've tried a few apps which will scan a
barcode, but they all seem quite slow. If I buy 50 items at the store, I don't
want to fiddle with it for 10 minutes to get everything scanned in, I'd like
to buzz through them relatively fast.

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pjc50
It is a bit slow, sadly.

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froindt
This is such a cool little project! I'm planning out a dedicated setup for my
kitchen, particularly for recipes, but inventory management is another
opportunity I've been wanting to explore.

Great writeup with detail!

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carrigan
Thank you very much! I'd love to hear about what you come up with for recipe
management.

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froindt
Right now I'm going very low tech for recipe management...I send a DM to my SO
on slack. That's most of what we use the DM for, an archive of things we've
made. We mostly need a bigger screen in the kitchen that stays on while making
a recipe. A Microsoft Surface we have laying around will be used for that.

I'd like to do a database of products purchase, purchase date, price paid,
scan a barcode and mark it as consumed, and calculate typical consumption rate
of the products.

I will keep things pretty simple, either a sqlite database that stays local or
a LAMP setup so I've got access to an inventory list at the store along with
"price check" functionality.

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Tyrant505
I'm working on this idea too! Hit me up on gmail! Love to chat.

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raarts
Apparently many grocery store chains offer APIs where you would be able to
download information on what you bought. Anybody know more on this?

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froindt
I checked Aldi and two regional grocery stores near me...no public API. One
does have a delivery service, but that API is closed off it looks like.

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harikb
Now, if only I can get Wunderlist to stop randomly duplicate my groceries list
items or clear the wrong item when checking off... I can see why array
indexing is a hard problem..

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Kiro
Where can I buy a scanner like this that is already hooked up to a todo-list?

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bostonvaulter2
Maybe you need to find someone to do a Kickstarter

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jxub
I'm already nervous to try it out.

