Barcode Scanner Smartphone
Janvier Bender
Barcodes and the accompanying scanners revolutionized the way companies manage their inventory and assets and the efficiency of supply chain processes. In the past, organizations relied on painstaking inventory counts, handwritten or spreadsheet records and manual data entry in multiple systems.
Your company employees probably carry a wide variety of mobile phones. These smartphones can vary by brand, version and operating system, so the compatibility of a scanner app with each device is not guaranteed. Here are some questions you need to ask:
Answering these questions should help you determine whether or not using a smartphone is a practical possibility for your business needs. If so, this should guide you to find the most useful and widely compatible scanning app that will work for your business as well as the best device for the job.
Consider the working environment and possible issues that might cause damage to a mobile phone and choose a solution to combat that. There are many accessories for smartphones designed for industrial or outdoor environments such as rugged cases or companion sled scanners (to make scanning easier) that are resistant to water, dust, shattering and more. You may need to purchase specific products and add-ons to ensure a smartphone is a feasible solution. You may also need to consider using a conventional barcode scanner that is purpose-built for demanding work environments.
Efficiency is an important consideration for barcode scanning, especially if your operations require ongoing, regular use of scanners. A mobile phone might not be the most efficient way to scan barcodes. Most smartphones do have auto-focus capabilities nowadays, but low lighting, water or dust can interfere with reading the barcode correctly or efficiently. This might be okay if your company only scans barcodes a few times a day, but can significantly impede scan-heavy inventory and asset management operations.
Another consideration is the size of the items to be scanned. A smartphone can be awkward to hold, especially if you need to also hold up the item in order for the camera to effectively scan it. How many times a day your organization uses a scanner and efficiency are important to know before choosing your scanning solution, whether smartphone or conventional barcode scanners.
How does the app send information to your inventory control or asset management system? Does it use Wi-Fi, or do you need cellular phone service to update the system? Typically, a smartphone can connect to Wi-Fi, but not every business location has reliable internet service. You need to know that the barcode scanner app for a smartphone offers the connectivity you need.
If scanned information is stored on a smartphone, how easy would it be for an unauthorized individual to gain the passcode and access company data? You want to make sure that you have a way to control the flow of any sensitive information from the phone into your company servers to ensure no one else has to access the data.
You know your employees are productive and dedicated, but it can be tempting to check messages (if using a personal phone), social media, email news or more over the course of the workday with a smartphone in hand. If you choose to use a smartphone as a barcode scanner, you may need a way to lock out the other apps either during work hours only or at all times.
You have to be confident your scanning will work first time, every time. Scandit-powered mobile apps outperform other barcode scanning software solutions on any device, under any condition, with any code.
You can easily use your phone as an inventory scanner. The Scandit Express app adds a custom keyboard to your smartphone. With it, you can scan barcodes directly from your keyboard into any text field of any application.
Historically, barcode scanning required both specialist hardware and specialist software. However, this is no longer the case. Modern barcode scanning software can run on any smart device with a camera, including consumer smartphones.
However, there are pre-built solutions available, such as Scandit SparkScan, that bundle multiple scanning features together and solve many common user experience and integration challenges for you. SparkScan enables you to integrate fast, ergonomic and customizable barcode scanning into any app with just a few lines of code.
The benefits of barcode scanning are that it is inexpensive, accurate, well-proven, easy to access and extremely versatile data entry method. Modern barcode scanning software can run on any smart device with a camera and often includes advanced smart data capture features such as batch scanning and AR overlays to improve efficiency and user experience.
One of your biggest decisions when choosing a barcode scanner will be whether to choose a dedicated barcode scanning device or use a smart device (e.g. a smartphone) equipped with barcode scanning software.
With the right barcode scanning software, today for most use cases any smart device with a camera can be used as a barcode scanner. Smart devices typically cost two-thirds less than dedicated scanners.
The trick to choosing the right barcode scanner for your needs is understanding what your barcode scanning users want, what they need to make them productive in the long term, and how much time and resource you have available for integration.
If you don't enable install-time model downloads or request explicit download,the model is downloaded the first time you run the scanner. Requests you makebefore the download has completed produce no results.
The specific pixel data requirements are dependent on both the type of barcode and the amount of data that's encoded in it, since many barcodes support a variable size payload. In general, the smallest meaningful unit of the barcode should be at least 2 pixels wide, and for 2-dimensional codes, 2 pixels tall.
For example, EAN-13 barcodes are made up of bars and spaces that are 1, 2, 3, or 4 units wide, so an EAN-13 barcode image ideally has bars and spaces that are at least 2, 4, 6, and 8 pixels wide. Because an EAN-13 barcode is 95 units wide in total, the barcode should be at least 190 pixels wide.
However, in applications where latency is critical, you can improve performance by capturing images at a lower resolution, but requiring that the barcode make up the majority of the input image. Also see Tips to improve real-time performance.
Starting from bundled model 17.1.0 and unbundled model 18.2.0, you can also callenableAllPotentialBarcodes() to return all potential barcodes even if theycannot be decoded. This can be used to facilitate further detection, for exampleby zooming in the camera to get a clearer image of any barcode in the returnedbounding box.
Further on, starting from bundled library 17.2.0 and unbundled library 18.3.0,a new feature called auto-zoom has been introduced to further enhance thebarcode scanning experience. With this feature enabled, the app is notified whenall barcodes within the view are too distant for decoding. As a result, the appcan effortlessly adjust the camera's zoom ratio to the recommended settingprovided by the library, ensuring optimal focus and readability. This featurewill significantly enhance the accuracy and success rate of barcode scanning,making it easier for apps to capture information precisely.
When auto-zooming is enabled and no barcodes are successfully decoded withinthe view, BarcodeScanner triggers your zoomCallback with the requestedzoomRatio. If the callback correctly adjusts the camera to this zoomRatio,it is highly probable that the most centered potential barcode will be decodedand returned.
A barcode may remain undecodable even after a successful zoom-in. In such cases,BarcodeScanner may either invoke the callback for another round of zoom-inuntil the maxSupportedZoomRatio is reached, or provide an empty list (or alist containing potential barcodes that were not decoded, ifenableAllPotentialBarcodes() was called) to the OnSuccessListener (whichwill be defined in step 4. Process the image).2. Prepare the input imageTo recognize barcodes in an image, create an InputImage objectfrom either a Bitmap, media.Image, ByteBuffer, byte array, or a file onthe device. Then, pass the InputImage object to theBarcodeScanner's process method.
Don't capture input at the camera's native resolution. On some devices, capturing input at the native resolution produces extremely large (10+ megapixels) images, which results in very poor latency with no benefit to accuracy. Instead, only request the size from the camera that's required for barcode detection, which is usually no more than 2 megapixels.
If you are trying to recognize barcodes from a sequence of streaming video frames, the recognizer might produce different results from frame to frame. You should wait until you get a consecutive series of the same value to be confident you are returning a good result.
We currently run 3 Square registers and 2 ipads for our retail store. I love the Square smartphone app. However, as far as I can tell, it's missing a feature that it really needs. I would like to be able to scan barcodes with an android smartphone CAMERA (like you can with the ipad app). Am I missing something or is this feature not available? I do understand I can connect a bluetooth barcode scanner but that's not what I want to do. Thank you!
Something I have been think about is that it would be really handy to be able to access the mobile phones camera and take a snap shot of a bar code or QR code and that information be sent directly to the database for inventory logging. We currently use mobile tablets on the floor so our production manager carries his tablet and scanner gun as he is inventorying product. It would be nice to be able to just carry the tablet it would also be more piratical on the back-end because right now the scanner information goes to the ControlLogix and I pull from there to the database, I believe it would be better and more efficient to bypass the ControlLogix and go directly to the database.
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