Electrics
Monday, June 20th, 2005Today is Monday. Monday Monday Monday Monday.
Today at work I discovered some old barcode reader that we were going to use for the parking lot gate. Well it didn’t work out, but we still had these old scanners lying around. These things are just the barcode reader (the swipe wedge types) with a cable coming off of it. Well, I thought I could find the pinouts or some documentation online and hook it up and get it working. Well, all I could find is this pdf. So I stripped all the wires, hooked up a 9V battery up to the power, and the led came on! Yay! It blinked green for a little while then went solid red. Okay, whatever that means, so I proceeded to splice these wires to a serial cable and hooked it up to my computer. I hook up power again, open up hyperterminal, and swipe a card. Nothing happens. Or rather only the led blinks green then goes solid red again. So I am splicing and grounding and deducing and engineering, really not knowing what I’m doing, and I finally get the barcode reader to do something when I attach the battery. I get it to blink green a couple of times then go solid red.
More ahead…
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