Inventory Tracking Using Handhelds?

DJ Decepticon asks: "I've recently been given the task to determine the feasibility of tracking several hundred workstations spread out across North America using a handheld device. Requirements include having a barcode and GPS reading and inputing that information into a spreadsheet. Would a handheld device such as Palm or Handspring be able to take on such a task?" Aparently there are PalmPilot's with integrated barcode readers at Symbol.Com, however I don't know about ones that also include GPS. If anyone has used these units before, how difficult would it be to add GPS functionality? Are there other solutions?

Comments

did it w/o GPS

[bearbones]

I've worked and programmed the symbol ones, to do this very thing (w/o the GPS). They work great. You should be able to do it with a GPS that attaches to the serial port with no problem.

Why GPS?

[duffbeer703]

Generally, computers are not located in the middle of the woods.

The barcode functionality should be fine for actual identification of the asset. Use good old fashioned address/room no. to locate the computer. If you don't want your people to have to manually enter data, use pull down menus or 4 digit alphanumeric codes for sites.

Remember that GPS requires a line of sight to 3 or more satellites and is accurate to 30m. I don't know about your sites, but my computer room is in the windowless 2nd floor of a 20-story building, where gps won't work. Also, a 30m margin of error could place my desk somewhere in the middle of the street.

Re:Why GPS?

[man_ls]

C-in-C Navstar (Forgive me the murder of the title), a colonel in the Air Force at Chyanne Mountain (NORAD headquarters, fyi) told me himself that that *was* true, but after the gulf war, the civilian accuracy limitaions were removed, and it is somewhere around 5 meters now, as opposed to a football field's length.

No, you can't get a tour. Trust me.

Re:Why GPS?

[man_ls]

Also, you only need LoS to two GPS satellites to get a LAT-LON reading. The third satellite gives you the third dimension (altitude) In the gulf, soldiers didn't have enough satellites to do 3 dimensions, but they were fine with the two dimensions of accuracy they had I doubt knowing how high the computer is off the desk is that big of a deal, so even if a satellite is blocked by something, two more will still give you a (slightly less accurate) reading.

Re:Why GPS?

[duffbeer703]

Knowing how high the computer is would be a very big deal.

Say the first floor of your building houses the HR and accounting staff; third floor houses call center agents. What group does a particular desktop belong to without height information?

I'll restate my original point; GPS is a total waste of time, unless you are inventorying pipeline equipment or something that is fixed and in a remote location.

What good does knowing where a PC is within 5 meters do? Offices reshuffle all the time and pc's change hands as new computers are ordered. All you need to know for a physical inventory is that the machine is present and what group (IT, development, accounting, etc) it belongs to.

I work in the enterprise systems management group for several large state agencies. We use Tivoli Inventory and a couple of asset management tools to inventory and keep track of over 65,000 pc's scattered throughout the state. As our network maps have evolved and become more details, we have been able to locate pc's down to the exact switch/hub port that it is connected to. If the pc is hooked to an unmanaged hub, we have scripts that talk to active directory and figure out who normally logs into the computer.

The scripts needed to accomplish this took two people about two weeks to implement. The result is inventory info that can be updated nearly in real-time, down to whatever level of detail you need.

Compare the cost of that to outfitting IT people with barcode reader equipped handhelds running all over the place scanning stuff.

Re:Why GPS?

[ka9dgx]

Actually, that's wrong. Since a GPS reciever can only tell the DIFFERENCE between the timings of incoming signals, you need at least 3 (if they happen to be far enough apart) to do 2 dimensional placement, and 4 if you want altitude. My good old Garmin 12 seems to think it's accurate to about 30 feet, but only works outdoors, and takes a long time to start up.

I second the notion that a simple barcode based tracking system is best here. While it's possible to spoof it, usually this isn't a concern. I was the programming staff for Management Support Systems, which marketed such a system using NORAND handhelds back in the 1990s... and am considering bringing the code back out of the closet, and putting a nice GUI in front of it for Windows.

--Mike--