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?
Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#32The 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.
Motorola are the respected brand, but it doesn't make a great difference. You might be able to get a local secondhand one. The more expensive ones do 2D barcodes, QR etc.
An important thing for secondhand ones is to download the manual; it will contain a set of configuration barcodes so you can factory reset it, turn off beeping, etc.
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#33The 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.
Like this guy, build around something you have as a starting point even if it's not what you'd choose from scratch.
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#34The 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.
Don't discount the value of learning something new and the enjoyment of working on a hobby project.
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For decoding serial one of those $5 logic analyzers is more than sufficient, you don't really need an oscilloscope at all. I don't really like using protocol decoding on my scope unless I need to correlate timing with an analog signal because it's tedious to set up and use for a simple digital signal.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-Arrival-USB-Logic-Analyz...
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For decoding serial one of those $5 logic analyzers is more than sufficient, you don't really need an oscilloscope at all. I don't really like using protocol decoding on my scope unless I need to correlate timing with an analog signal because it's tedious to set up and use for a simple digital signal. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/New-Arrival-USB-Logic-Analyz...
It's worth noting that some of those cheap logic analyser only work with pirated versions of expensive logic analysers software.
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#37We'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.
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?
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wer…
Wow, it also has drivers for the raspberry Pi ! https://www.picotech.com/support/topic14649.html
This pairing would make for a trully tiny all in one oscilliscope, i'm tempted to get a picoscope and a tiny LCD just for laughs: project #1
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#39The 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.
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.
Re: Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wer…
Wow, it also has drivers for the raspberry Pi ! https://www.picotech.com/support/topic14649.html This pairing would make for a trully tiny all in one oscilliscope, i'm tempted to get a picoscope and a tiny LCD just for laughs: project #1
You may not want to do that. The sampling rate is very important on a scope, especially for analog signals because of Nyquist.