CueCat

I found this document about CueCat:

  http://www.fluent-access.com/wtpapers/cuecat/cue.html

There seem to some limitations of its usability:

  Are there any limitations on the character set as used in the
  device? Unfortunately, yes. Experimentation suggests that the
  CueCat is only capable of reporting only those codes that have
  assigned graphic characters in the Code C table of the Code-128
  specification. Specifically, the values 00 through 95 are reported
  by the CueCat; attempts to return 96 through 99 cause a null
  report from the device. That means that there are exactly 96^6
  -- 782,757,789,696 -- possible combinations. If you remove the DEL
  code as problematic, then you have 95^6 or only 735,091,890,625
  combinations of cues available in the cue universe.

  How many barcode characters can a Cue have in it? In an experiment
  to see just how the checksum calculation survives the test of more
  and more digits, we started with a single 11 code, and worked our
  way up to nineteen 11 codes. On the 20th 11 code, the wand refused
  to respond. Now, 19 codes (that's 38 characters) makes for a long
  barcode. To check to see if this may be an inherent limitation of
  the reader, I explored the boundary in standard Code 128, and found
  that the wand reacted in exactly the same way when you threw too
  many digits at it. Ah, well, you get what you pay for...

So maybe we are back the 95 characters...

Here is a bar code containing the number 96979899 in Code C. It would
be interesting to hear if it can be scanned by the CueCat:

  http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/voting-project/cuecat.pdf

Also, can it scan the longer of the bar codes in my sample? From the
above, it does not seem so.

/Jan
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Received on Tue Sep 30 23:17:07 2003