On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 09:28:53AM +0800, william villanueva wrote: > Dear Doc Mana, > > On Tuesday, February 10, 2004 09:16, you wrote: > > > An alternative, if you do not want to be tied to the PC is to get > > a wireless CF card to connect to your PC, and use an irDA scanner > > program. > > I need to be "walking" around so the need for the wireless and at the same > time need to use a bar code scanner. > I don't think the regular irDA of those handhelds has the power to scan > small barcodes, much less those in from big boxes, do they?
With an SL-5500, the kind with which I have the most familiarity, you can't do what you want easily. There is a CF slot, an SD slot, and a serial port on the bottom. The best that you could do is put a wireless CF card in (I have one, works great), and use a serial scanner with the bottom connector. The scanner will need its own power supply. Also, you'll have to buy the expensive US$50 serial cable for the Zaurus. The Zaurus' USB hardware is not a controller, meaning that it can connect to your PC via USB, but it cannot control any peripherals connected to it. Shameful, that, since I wanted to hook up a keyboard and mouse! The other problem is that serial scanners are more difficult to deal with than USB. USB scanners just look like a keyboard to the computer. It's easy to create web forms and use the USB scanner to fill in a field on the form. Not so easy with the serial, where you'll have to write code to read the serial port to get the data. Your best bet might be to write something that would read the characters from the serial port and then send them as keyboard messages to the foreground application. I actually wrote a web-based application on the Zaurus using Boa as the web server, Konqueror as the browser, and Perl for the actual back end code. I put vim on the Zaurus and ssh'd into it to do development. The 5500 is great for such, with a 200MHz processor and nothing else to do. Plus, all data is on ramdisk or CF, so access is lightning fast. Michael -- Michael Darrin Chaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.michaelchaney.com/ -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
