Inventory system

Inventory system [[Image:{{{picture}}}|200px]] What: what is where and who's is it Tagline: what the F*%£ is in the space Maintainer(s): Wouter Simons Archived: yes

the issue

there are many many things at the space ... some them are peoples property, some of it is free to use .. some of it is involved in projects ..... keeping track of this is difficult. so lets have computers do it for us

proposition

tag everything with randmoly generated QR codes automatically make a wiki page for the object once it's scanned for the first time (note wiki does something like this already .. if you go to a non-existent page it invites you to create it ) and create a machine at the space that's set up to read these codes and edit the wiki.

thoughts on hardware

easiest to get would be a PC with a webcam and a (touch?) screen maybe plus a keyboard and a mouse or trackball for data entry

Wouldn't a tablet or smartphone for scanning the object be better, then allow people to edit it themself on the wiki? Write a simple android app for it and off you go? (just my thought)

thoughts on th QR-codes

we can print QR codes in advance on a label that also alowes you to take notes we can also print the string human-readable under or next to the code in order to allow someone without smartphone to read it (when teh box at the space is not available)

keep the string quite short so even low quality cameras can read it. 5 digit string of letters and numbers (to keep something user-readable) should give us about 60.466.176 to tag (should be enough for now

google app engine has an automated QR code generator .. you call it by goint to this URL ..http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=yourstring&chld=H%7C0 (replacing yoursting with whatever you want)

possible pluses

if we're using a webcam to read a qr-ode we might also use that webcam to take a picture of the object

list of usable technologies

zbar (Linux APP) has both a zbarimg (recognizes QR codes in an image) and zbarcam (recognizes QR codes on a webcam) the app just returns the QR code in a textstring .. so we'll have to do something with that

MAYBE usefull links

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6771500/how-can-i-direct-output-from-a-program-to-fill-a-form-on-a-webpage

Proof of concept

zbarcam >> qrlog & tail -f qrlog | ./browserscript

browserscript

#!bin/bash while read line do i=$(echo $line | sed 's/QR-Code://g'); iceweasel $i done