Fri, 09 Sep 2005
Barcode scanner and Linux
My brother has a CipherLab 8001 hand-held barcode scanner/terminal, and we have been trying to make this beast working under Linux. It has a craddle with RS-232 serial cable, but instead of text protocols it spills out a binary mess to the serial line.
After looking carefully at the craddle we have found that the craddle has in fact a built-in infrared port, and it communicates with the scanner via this port. So maybe they are using the craddle as an IR serial port dongle and communicate via the IrDA protocol. The craddle serial port seems to run at 115200 bps, probably with 8-N-1 port settings.
I was prepared to try all Linux IrDA serial dongle drivers against the craddle, but then my brother found another solution, that surprisingly-enough worked: their DOS/Windows command-line utility for IR transfers works perfectly well under Wine, even without any additional libraries, and even on the command line without the graphical environment.
Nevertheless, I want to try the IrDA communication with this device from my laptop when I get some time ...