On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 19:35 +0900, Stefan Schmiedl wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:25:51 +0900, Adrian Roskrow wrote:
> 
> > Hi
> > 
> > I was wondering whether any one had got any experience or software to
> > access the USB ports. I have got a rs232 scanner that I can connect to a
> > USB port. I would like to get it to work to read ISBN numbers so I can
> > put the details in a mysql database. I have done programming before
> > (java C shell scripts) but am quite new to ruby, what I have seen so far
> > is really good. I would be very glade of some help/or software I can
> > hack to do what I want to do with ruby as the language of choice.
> > 
> > Adrian
> >
> 
> the barcode scanners I know emulate a keyboard, so using them from 
> ruby should be a matter of plugging them in and reading from $stdin.
> 
> s.
> 

There's also OPOS ( Ole for Point Of Sale), is another mechanism that is
common with scanners, especially in the retail/POS industry.  They can
run through USB, parallel or rs-232.  I know that there is some VB code
out there to test the OPOS interface, so it might be possible to find
that, and convert it.  Sorry I don't remember how they did it, but it
wasn't too complex (c'mon, it was in VB)

Matt