Cuecat and the basic stamp

Oper8r Al

I was just reading a copy of Hardware Hacking, by·Joe Grand,·that someone gave me and was wondering if anyone had tried to use a cuecat barcode reader with a basic stamp. Just thought it might be a fun project to work on, but thought I would get some insight before I tried to find a Cuecat on ebay.

Thanks in advance,

Al

uxorious

Unfortunately you probably won't have a lot of luck, unless you plan to do a lot of groundwork. The Cuecat sends encoded data through it's PS2 connection that is deciphered by the software originally designed for the Cuecat. There are hacker sites where people have "broke the code" however and I would recommend starting there to see if you want to take it on with a stamp. You need to decode the PS2 and then the scanned data. Here's an old site with some detail for example (an old bookmark from when I thought a freebie cuecat was a score)
www.accipiter.org/projects/cat.php

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~~ dRu ~~

Joe Grand

You should easily be able to interface the CueCat to the Propeller. Since the CueCat will appear as a standard PS/2 keyboard, the Propeller has some SPIN modules that will let you seamlessly read in keystrokes.

I could be wrong, but it seems like you could possibly use the BS2 to communicate with PS/2 devices, too, since it's just a fairly low-speed serial interface.

Joe

PS - Thanks for reading the book! Hope you enjoy it. [noparse]:)[/noparse]

uxorious

You may also want to look at the serial scanners on eBay. The symbol LS-1220 should work with the stamp and sometimes go cheap.

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~~ dRu ~~

Oper8r Al

Thanks dRu and Joe for the input. I will continue to play around with it and see what I come up with.

Joe, yes I did enjoy the book.

Al