andriod phones can read bar codes.

i believe those single process can't cut and paste, closed source phones from that scandinavian design company that makes over priced computers that don't play well with others and have more unpatched security holes than any other commercial os can do it too.

Doesn't the Android (and iPhone) use a barcode OCR to translate barcodes from photos? We can use anything to grab them, we just need to have something that we could keep at the space for easy registration, or if we decide to: CheckIn/CheckOut of equipment.

Camera-phone OCR decoding of barcodes is cool. Could we take that idea a little further into the DIY realm? You know, hack together a hand-held wireless scanner gun with a webcam and a wi-fi chip? The software logic wouldn't need to reside on the scanner.

No immediate hurry; obviously we don't have a shop, database, or even actual inventory yet.

If we're going to go down this road, wouldn't it be easier to use a digital camera, and either manually upload the barcode picts or use one of these:

http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/ ... ifi-memory

Easier still would be to buy an actual mobile barcode scanner, with laser reader, like big stores & auto auctions use to take inventory. It's just not punk rock, though.

Not to go all low tech on you guys, but you could probably just get a cheap used scanner that enters data through a keyboard port.

The thought of barcodes makes me shudder, I get too much of that garbage in my job.

Well sure. Harder to bring the bigger/heavier items over to a computer, though. And there's always laptops, but still, it'd be cooler to roll our own. Y'know, as makers.

A low-tech system, to me, would be more like a "tool rolodex".

aaah cuecat. where are you now?

Well you could always hack the scanner to work with an Xbee.

See, now we're back on track.