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CueCats vs. Common Sense Marketing
ColaMan writes "I see via boing boing that two million CueCats are up for sale at prices of $0.30 each in quantities above 500K. CueCats, being an integral part of one of the most pointless marketing schemes ever devised, never took off, but they were great for hacking. Has IT Marketing learned its history lesson, or will it forever doomed to repeat it?" Err, I'd go in for a group order, but I don't need two million at once.
Still, 150 grand for half a million cuecats is kinda steep for most people. Plus, that's like a frigging truckload of the damn things. Of course, if you can find 10 thousand people who want cuecats, it's a different story....
...You'd wind up paying 150,000USD for a bunch of nigh-useless barcode scanners, joy!
Thirty cents a unit is very cheap, but, frankly the cuecat sucked. The range is zero (literally) and the scan reliability was very poor unless you had the dexterity to move the thing across the barcodes at an exact, constant speed every time.
:)
I got a small box of these from a Radio Shack which was trying to get rid of them, and briefly tried to set up a POS for a client based on the 'Cat. Two weeks of constant phone calls later, I had the client fork over $100 per seat for some medium range one-shot LED scanners and life was good.
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
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Okay, so forget all the complex software listed in the article links. Just hardware mod it! Instructions here: http://www.zapwizard.com/MediaPC/CueCat/Index.html .
Oh, and it seems they made lots of USB CueCats. Strange how people don't seem to talk about those. At least half of them on eBay are USB.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
As far as I know (from my googling of hacks for the cat), there is a USB version, and it isn't just a mod, it's an official honest-to-god-peice-of-crap cat.
And to make it scan normal text barcodes, you have to open up the kitty and pry up a pin connecting one of them chip-looking things to the circut board-looking thing.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
This comes in handy with a lot of hacks and mods using Linux to drive it.
You can hack them to work as a barcode scanner with a linux driver.
Then you can use them like any other barcode scanner. Set up a web cgi to allow you to barcode scan the ISBN number of a book, and automatically show you the best place to sell it online based on competing prices -- amazon used or half.com. Print out barcodes on one of those cheap $15 casio label printers, and then label all your scrap auto parts and put them in a text file or database with the location you are storing them. Or set up a check out system just like a library for your own books, so when your leacher friends borrow them you can have a cronjob spam them when they don't return them.
Most of the other barcode scanners on the market are industrial quality and expensive.
Most commerical scanners have a low power laser. Cue Cats, however, use a pair of high intensity LEDs.
Not exactly. Most wand scanners use an LED. Also, there are many commercial scanners that use focused LEDs. Also, for area imagers that read matrix codes, a laser would not be a satisfactory or efficient means of illumination.
LED scanners have the advantage of no moving parts, since a laser scanner requires a motor of some sort to physically form scan lines. Their maximum range however is generally not as long as that as laser illuminated scanners.
I was thinking the same thing, until I realized the obvious..
The mouse doesn't output what it sees, it outputs the same X, Y axis changes as a "normal" mouse (although optical mice are pretty much the status quo nowadays). All the processing is done internally and the results are sent via USB or PS/2 or whatever.
There may be a troubleshooting mode, or methods for triggering the mouse to output the raw data rather than coordinate changes, but you'd either have to know about them from the engineers, or spend who knows how long sending random signals to the mouse. Also, shifting the burden of processing the images from the mouse to the CPU would likely take up a nontrivial amount of system resources and lower the performance and reaction time of the mouse.
You could do a hardware mod, of course, but that would be nontrivial as well, and would likely require a custom designed "mod chip" to check for valid barcodes in parallel with the existing image analysis.. hardly worth the effort.
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