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.

Comments

Such a deal!

[justinstreufert]

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

Answered my own question: Info on Hardware Mod

[sH4RD]

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.

Re:Optical Mouse as Barcode Reader?

[StikyPad]

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.