Barcode Scanner Development

Executive Summary

Our customer’s retail store chain spans many states in the US with store formats that include grocery, multi-department stores, convenience stores and mall jewelry stores.

Since our customer was not having engineering team they approached us to develop barcode scanner. The barcode scanning device consumes very low power in order to provide longer battery life. Two processors manage to perform wireless as well as imager and barcode scanning process. The Zigbee (wireless technology) based processor handles all communication with servers. The controller handles image capturing and previewing as well as barcode decoding using the captured image. Two processors communicate with each other using UART.

eInfochips had worked with the customer at their site to develop a Low power image sensor based barcode scanning device. eInfochips’ team experts from domains like Linux, Zigbee and Imaging has worked on this project andhas helped to reduce the project cost over 20%.

The Customer

Our customer is one of the largest retail chain in US. They are well known for their smart services using technologies.

They are present in most of the states in US. They wanted to have a low power scanner for faster processes and eInfochips has suggested them to have barcode based scanner.

The Challenge

  • We had to incorporate 14 keys keypad to allow user to support text messaging to other devices in the network. It also has audio supporti used to voice chat with other devices in the network.

The Solution

Design & Development

eInfochips has carried out various development to execute the project properly.

  • Board Bring up
    • This enables the bringing up of test utilities for devices. This includes memory, imager interface, display interface, audio, keypad, UART, wireless interface etc.
  • Device Driver Development
    • This Development of device drivers for imager and display interfaces and integrate into existing stack of target Linux system, display interface. This Driver for keypad handles all key interrupts and to bring other processor out of sleep mode.
  • Middleware Development
    • Development of Middleware is to incorporate the porting of barcode decoding algorithm on target processor and to integrate it into the target application.

With this development, we have enabled the barcode scanner to support the following features.

  • Capture image using image sensor and read the barcode or save it on flash memory
  • Barcode scanning support for Linear and 2-D barcode algorithms
  • Communicate with server through wireless network
  • TFT LCD (3.5’) support to display messages and images
  • USB support for charging and data transfer capabilities
  • SD support for data storage support

Technology

  • Platform: ARM, TI CC2431, Embedded Linux
  • Barcode
  • Linux
  • ZIgbee

The Benefit

  • The customer had very limited expertise on technology as they are in different business all together so we understood their requirements and provided them Barcode scanner which is direct to use.
  • With “On Time Every Time” approach we reduce time cost for the customer over 25%.