Optical Mice as Cheap Barcode Scanners?

Ikester asks: "I've been evaluating a couple of barcode scanners including the CueCat (which some of you may recall from the failed off- online marketing stint by Digital Convergence) for a cataloging application. However, getting ahold of these 'free' wands is not that easy these days and it occurred to me that an optical mouse's hardware may be able to perform a similar function with the right mouse driver. For example, it could work as a regular mouse until it 'recognizes' a valid barcode. It could then send the code as if the user had typed it. I Googled the web and newsgroups but I didn't find anything relevant. I'm wondering if anybody from the Slashdot crowd has come across such an approach. With the recent proliferation of optical mice I'm thinking this could be the next best input device for linear barcodes. I have limited knowledge about mouse drivers and the actual design of these mice. Is this even possible?"

Comments

Mature answer? Please?

[Ikester]

Thanks for the explanation in the first scentence. However, I don't see why you need to insult.

You may know about peripheral hardware but based on your "analogy" with OO programming comment, it is clear that you have a lot to learn in that field. I promise that if you ever post a question about OO, I'll give you an honest and mature answer, and I won't call you a moron for asking (even if you are one).

Highly unlikely

[TheSHAD0W]

It's a nice idea... Unfortunately, optical mice do all their processing onboard. They don't send any raw data to the PC. I also doubt any use flash memory, and so are capable of a firmware upgrade; and even if they were, it's unlikely they'd have sufficient space to be able to handle both tasks. I suppose the right firmware could make the mouse simply dump raw data upstream and let your PC do the decoding, but that'd also make it incompatible with regular mouse drivers.