Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

bcarrigan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

#22

Post by himom »

tomxor wrote: post #2

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.

Watch EEVblog and bigclive on YT for oscilloscope advice.

Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

#23

Post by himom »

joewee wrote: post #20
carrigan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any guides in getting started with an oscilloscope?

eevblog has an extensive collection of oscilloscope vids.

Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

#24

Post by Willson50 »

pjc50 wrote: post #17

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.

That's the same problem I have with a lot of hobby projects I think of doing. There's always a cheaper or more time efficient way to do things.

Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

#26

Post by mikevin »

pjc50 wrote: post #17

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

#27

Post by DanBC »

himom wrote: post #22
tomxor wrote: post #2

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.

Watch EEVblog and bigclive on YT for oscilloscope advice.

bigclive works on electric / electronic stuff, and he's sometimes a bit sniffy about cheap hobbyist kit. (Fair enough when he's talking about things you use with / on mains electricity where there's a risk of death.)

For RS232 any 'scope is going to be fine, even a chinese clone knockoff or an ancient second hand scope.

Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

#28

Post by Moru »

vxNsr wrote: post #8

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 wel…

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.

Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

#29

Post by joshvm »

tomxor wrote: post #5
slig wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an electronics enthusiast (play with it on weekends) and the Rigol DS1054Z oscilloscope (it's the same used by OP) has a really good cost/benefit, and it's also hackable.

Yes I was just looking at it, £300 seems pretty reasonable. A while ago I was looking at old used stuff but even they are in the thousands. Thanks for recommending it, it's nice to know some HN readers are using it because I don't really know what to look for in an oscilliscope :)

If you want a cheaper and more portable solution, have a look at Picoscope (UK). Don't believe the guff about USB scopes being garbage. These things have plenty of bandwidth and it's really nice being able to carry around a scope in your pocket.

Unless you do a lot of high speed IO, 25MHz covers pretty much everything (most 8-bit Micros top out at 20MHz, some go to 48-50MHz). Even the 10MHz version is fine if you were just doing audio work or slower digital stuff.

For £300 you could get a 50MHz 2 channel scope (at 0.5Gs/s). If you want 4 channels you're not going to beat the Rigol for price, but portability matters sometimes (other times being able to monitor every SPI line simultaneously is a godsend). I have a Rigol DS1104Z and a Picoscope 2205A, I've used both extensively.

Plus you get a lot of nice features in the software (which is cross platform), including serial decoding for free. Most of them have a signal generator built in too.

Post reply on HN