Barcode scannen
In November 2004 I have started a product to identify people with an identification card. The main goal was to keep the costs as low as possible. And it did, with only € 500 euros the whole soft- and hardware solution was installed. But for that reason a lot of hi-tech material was no option.
The cheapest option was barcode scanning. Some advantages
- You can make as many as you like.
- You can print them with every printer.
- The hardware costs are very low.
- It’s easy to implement with software, especially if you use a keyboard wedge scanner.
In our situation it’s became a web interface along with a MySQL database and a Metrologic Keyboard wedge barcode scanner.
Technique to make the barcode
You can install barcode fonts on your front end computer to produce the code. Even though I wanted some more exchange possibilities. So I generated the codes on the fly using the Barcode Render Class from Karim Mribti (http://www.mribti.com/barcode/).
On his site there are a lot of examples. The easiest way is to attaché his code as library to your own site. After that you can use it to print a barcode image as:
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echo "<img src='image.php?code=".$barcode."&style=452&type=I25&width=200&height=120&xres=2&font=5'>";
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With the right database optimalisation (MyISAM table objects) the performance was that good that it was able to produce thousands of code's at a time.
As the personal information relies in the database you can make as many of statistics as you want, think of average age, number of visits and so on.
Even when a company as this one would start another bar you could use database replication to synchronise the visitors.
The image.php could like something like this
<?php
/*
Barcode Render Class for PHP using the GD graphics library
Copyright (C) 2001 Karim Mribti
Version 0.0.7a 2001-04-01
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Copy of GNU Lesser General Public License at: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.txt
Source code home page: http://www.mribti.com/barcode/
Contact author at: barcode@mribti.com
*/
define (__TRACE_ENABLED__, false);
define (__DEBUG_ENABLED__, false);
require("barcode.php");
require("i25object.php");
if (!isset($style)) $style = BCD_DEFAULT_STYLE;
if (!isset($width)) $width = BCD_DEFAULT_WIDTH;
if (!isset($height)) $height = BCD_DEFAULT_HEIGHT;
if (!isset($xres)) $xres = BCD_DEFAULT_XRES;
if (!isset($font)) $font = BCD_DEFAULT_FONT;
$obj = new I25Object($width, $height, $style, $code);
if ($obj) {
$obj->SetFont($font);
$obj->DrawObject($xres);
$obj->FlushObject();
$obj->DestroyObject();
unset($obj); /* clean */
}
?>
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