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Comment by teolemon | Hacker News Reader

We need a modern opensource barcode reader. The best thing (zxing) is in maintenance mode, and the newer barcode scanners with niceties like neural scan, 90% scan, bortched barcode scan are all closed source.

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I agree, I once took a shot at porting ZXing to the Microsoft Hololens. I was amazed that there aren't very many open source barcode interpreters available right now.

This is so true. It blows my mind that nothing exist beyond zxing. Barcodes are everywhere, and quick access to them is the gate-way to a million cool apps, etc.

I tried to write my own scanner in Python, but couldn't get it reliable enough to release.

Is there anything wrong with maintenance mode if it works?

In my experience it doesn't really work that well.

I was trying to make a barcode scanner out of a raspberry pi with a camera module during a hackathon once. What an absolute nightmare.

My code probably would have worked with good image quality, but I wanted something more robust that would work with a cheap webcam. I imagine the pi camera module is about the same.

Yeah, image quality was what made us abandon the idea but before that I found it really troublesome to setup and use zxing to do anything at all.

OpenCueCat?

We’re too young to remember that awesome issue of Wired

I still have mine! It works as a regular bar code reader for helping organize my library

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