Hello,
I recently purchased a scanner off ebay to read barcodes. Turns out it is something called "Light Pen" instead of RS232. Does anyone know what it's application is? I'm told by the manufacturer that it cannot read a barcode and send the ASCII data to a PC. I'd love to find a way to make this work :) If I can't, my friend who is building a robot might get an early Christmas gift :)
Thanks,
Dean
There are a couple of different devices described under the name "light pen" but it sounds like you have a dumb barcode scanner head, which has a source of illumination (often an LED) and a phototransistor. The output is simply the raw output of the phototransistor, which fluctuates according to the albedo of whatever surface is under the active area of the scan head.
You need to write a lot of realtime software to capture the incoming baseband and decode it. You could do it all in a small microcontroller, which could then give you the RS232 output you crave, but it is not at all a plug-n-play sort of thing.
Is the microcontroller something that can be purchased? I can't figure out what this particular scanner is useful for as-is. It is a Metrologic MS951-15.
Wow. Interesting. Looks like this is a modern CCD/CMOS image sensor type scanner that has been set up to emulate the old LED+phototransistor arrangement. It would be useful with old terminals that require the old type of dumb sensor. The advantage of this unit is that it has consistent timing, unlike the dumb sensor which has variable timing as you vary the swipe speed. No you can't buy the micro you need off the shelf (TTBOMK).
Could it be one of the very old devices which were used to point to a computer monitor screen and pick out a position on the screen by the timing of the raster as it came past? These would have had only a photo transistor in them, no light source.
Just a guess.
------------------------------------------------ Jim Adney snipped-for-privacy@vwtype3.org Madison, WI 53711 USA
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If you search for the model and mfr you see that it's actually a narrow shaver-style scan head, sold with several interface options, one of which is RS232. Seems like this particular variant emulates the type of dumb photoFET reader used to read barcodes e.g. in libraries. Weird idea.
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