Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#11

Post by snowwrestler » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 3:54 PM UTC

> Safari and IE do not allow the access to the camera yet, neither on desktop, nor on mobile. You can check caniuse for updates.

I assume this could be solved by wrapping the JS library in something like PhoneGap and installing it as a native app?

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#12

Post by uptown » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 4:02 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #11

> Safari and IE do not allow the access to the camera yet, neither on desktop, nor on mobile. You can check caniuse for updates. I assume this could be solved by wrapping the JS library in something like PhoneGap and installing it as a native app?

That's correct. Phonegap/Cordova gets you access to the camera, and would provide the ability to capture an image for local-processing with this library.

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#13

Post by tszming » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 4:30 PM UTC

Very impressive.

Fast and accurate under Android/Firefox Mobile, will use it in the coming project.

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#14

Post by lnanek2 » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 4:50 PM UTC

tubelite wrote: post #7

This is great news. I just wrote a QRcode-reader Django widget to be used on a mobile browser, using the LazarSoft library ( https://github.com/LazarSoft/jsqrcode ). The library worked great, but the HTML5 bits turned out to be surprisingly painful. Camera selection works differently in different browsers - Android Chrome has an API, Firefox throws up a selection dialog every time. Mobile Chrome doesn't let you emit…

I've had similar issues on Google Glass, which has no auto-focus. Commercial libraries like Scandit and even the paid app by the zxing author have better support for blurry images and are able to handle, for example pixels which are partially white/black instead of trying to bin everything into on or off, but the open source version lacks this capability. So sometimes it is possible to do without good focus if you have a better algorithm.

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#15

Post by ikyriakidis » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 4:51 PM UTC

I was looking for something like that back in 2010 :) Nice trye :)

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#16

Post by jHoldroyd » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 5:03 PM UTC

Fantastic library, we've tried a few like it before and none of them really worked quickly or reliably enough.

We did a quick mashup of our API and this to create a basic (but functional) mobile PoS using the phone camera as a scanner.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3TWAKxIYAALMp7.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B3TYETSIAAErP8U.jpg

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#17

Post by uberneo » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 8:43 PM UTC

https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/miniqr -- This does the same .. very handy

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#18

Post by serratus » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

chime wrote: post #2

Invariant to scale and rotation in JS on mobile? That's fantastic! I just tested the Red Laser native app on my phone and it can handle scale/rotation too. But I never thought about rotation for the Red Laser app and always tried to align it properly between the [ ] brackets. I think apps that support scale/rotation should not show [ ] brackets but instead a central red +. Haven't dug deeply into how barcode_locator.…

Thanks for the input, I haven't really thought of that before. But since the barcode is usually in the center of the viewport this makes a lot of sense. I'll give it a try and thanks for adding an improvement issue on GitHub.

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#19

Post by serratus » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 10:01 PM UTC

tubelite wrote: post #7

This is great news. I just wrote a QRcode-reader Django widget to be used on a mobile browser, using the LazarSoft library ( https://github.com/LazarSoft/jsqrcode ). The library worked great, but the HTML5 bits turned out to be surprisingly painful. Camera selection works differently in different browsers - Android Chrome has an API, Firefox throws up a selection dialog every time. Mobile Chrome doesn't let you emit…

I'm still facing the same problems with the missing autofocus. For some devices it works out of the box, like the HTC one mini, but for the most it does not. There is actually an open issue about that in the Chrome-Browser for Android (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=343894)

It would help a lot to get continous autofocus working in the browsers. Especially with barcodes, since their size requires the camera to be really close.

Re: Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

#20

Post by serratus » Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 10:06 PM UTC

SunboX wrote: post #3

There's also a port of ZBar using Emscripten / asm.js: https://github.com/yurydelendik/zbarjs and a hand-made port of ZXing by Wojciech Szela here: https://github.com/wojciechszela/zxingjs

The hand-made port looks really promising. This could work alongside QuaggaJS as the decoding part, since ZXing does not locate the barcode.