CODEWITHSUNDEEP
laravel-5qr-codelampbarcode-scannerscanning
Terje Nesthus
Terje Nesthus

Reputation: 820

Best barcodes and how/what to generate barcodes from, and how to store it the best way?

I am writing an webapp for a used thrift store. We are planning to add all items to a database, and I will be using Laravel and MySQL for this.

We also want to get a barcode scanner in order to scan and add items.

But I've never worked with barcodes before and info regarded this for a website like mine is hard to find info on, so is the barcode-scanners so I'm asking help from someone with experience.

I'm not sure which barcodes we should use, but I'm thinking a 3D one, like QR would do good. I've found several qr-generators, but I'm unsure on how I should create them properly from items.

Say the store is named Brukten. And it has items, with number IDs. Should I then generate barcodes out of "Brukten_53" or something, or just the ID, or how is a smart way? Because I can use an option like this instead of storing the generated barcode, right, and its better to generate a QR each time instead of storing the data about it?

At first we will use a web interface to add items, and later on we want to get a barcode-scanner to help scan things, so I'm guessing it would be nice with a scanner that could take pictures and add to database. So we want the DB to be ready for this, and properly made to work with such systems. So I'm wondering also if anyone can recommend me a device for this. I've seen several but unsure what to choose. 2d, 3d, something with camera, or is there other devices we could use?

What we want a device for is:

Something easier than going around with a laptop, phone or a tablet and entering stuff.

Building the site is no problem for me, PHP, MySQL, Laravel framework and all is old stuff, but barcodes is a new world for me.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 6265

Answers (1)

NiloVelez
NiloVelez

Reputation: 3659

You only have to make sure that every single distinct physical item has a unique ID.

A simple way to accomplish this is using category ids as prefixes. Suppose your "used men clothes category" is ID 25, and when you enter a pair on jeans of that category into the system, you app assign them ID 12345. You can reference that item as 002500012345. You only need to calculate the 13rd digit using this function (http://edmondscommerce.github.io/php/barcode/ean13-barcode-check-digit-with-php.html) and you have a full-fledged EAN13 barcode you can print using this font (http://www.fontpalace.com/font-details/EAN-13/) and read with virtually any code scanner.

The other approach is generating a unique url for each product: http://www.example.com/25/12345.html And embed the url into a QR code.

You can generate the image for the QR code using this library: http://phpqrcode.sourceforge.net/

Upvotes: 3

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