EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE RADIO SHACK BAR-CODE READER Bob Scott 73125,1437 The Radio Shack Bar-code reader (BCR) is designed to interface with the Model 100/102/200 Portable Computers. The BCR is furnished with a cassette tape which contains the following programs: B3OF9.CO - Driver for reading three of nine encoded bar codes. This is a very common alpha-numeric code used by industry. UPC.CO - Driver for reading Uniform Product Codes (UPC-A) such as appear on items in the supermarket. PLESY.CO - Driver to read the less popular Plessy Bar Code. READBC.BA - A sample application program demonstrating how the above drivers can be used in a BASIC program. INVCRE.BA and INVENT.BA - A simple set of inventory programs which produces inventory lists based on scanning the bar codes of items in stock. HARDWARE: The wand plugs into you computer via the DB-9 jack labeled "BCR". The wand is manufactured by Hewlett-Packard, and is equivalent to their Model HEDS-3000. Since most of the HP wands are electrically identical(except for the connector), you may wish to use another model for special purposes (e.g. a metal-cased, sapphire-tipped model for heavy use). The wand features a press-to-read switch to conserve battery power, and a replaceable tip. SOFTWARE: The "driver" programs listed above are the key to the use of the wand. After loading them from disk or tape, you activate the driver of your choice with a "RUNM filename" from BASIC. This may also be done under program control. The driver is deactivated with a CALL statement. Although you may have all three drivers in memory as .CO files, only one may be active at a time. Since the activation and deactivation may take place under program control, this is not a serious limitation. After activating a driver with the RUNM statement, you get data from the BCR just like any other device (cassette, RS-232, etc.) with an INPUT# statement. The BCR is set up as a numbered I/O unit with the usual OPEN statement, e.g. 10 OPEN "WAND:" FOR INPUT AS 1 That's pretty much it. Software is available on the SIG to print out 3-of-9 barcodes on several popular printers, although the quality of dot-matrix printed bar-codes can be problematic. You may wish to buy commerically printed bar-code stickers for critical applicaions.