They're ubiquitous. They're advertised in this magazine. In fact, close the book and look at the lower left of the front cover and you'll see one. Barcodes are everywhere and they come in all different shapes and sizes.
As a Pocket PC enthusiast you have, I'm sure, seen barcode scanners that will fit into a CF slot, or you have seen the Symbol or Intermec barcode scanners. If you work in retail you may have used a barcode scanner, and, of course, if you do any shopping at all your purchases have been scanned at the checkout line.
This article is not a tutorial on barcodes or barcode scanning. Instead it is intended to discuss a newer type of barcode and a new type of scanner. Along with that I'll discuss a software package I wrote for reading barcodes and maintaining inventories. These aren't your average supermarket inventories, but asset inventories, such as office equipment and furniture, or server farms and peripherals, or even the fielding of entire aircraft.
The 2D barcode
But first let's talk about this new type of barcode, called the "Data Matrix CC 200 two-dimensional barcode." That's a mouthful, so from here on we'll refer to it as a "2D tag." The interesting thing about 2D tags is that they can hold significantly more data than a standard one-dimensional barcode, such as the IPC on the front of this magazine. Another interesting thing about 2D tags is that they contain redundant data. This means that a portion of the tag (up to 60%) can be destroyed without damaging the integrity of the data.
Figure 1 depicts a number of 2D tags. The upper-left tag is one that I generated for our internal office inventory. If you scan it from this page you will find that it contains data that says, "KI0000." The larger tag beneath it contains the following sentence. "Hal Goldstein is a really nice guy. You should read his magazine." The larger image on the right is a sheet of thirty-five InfoDot 2D tags (see sidebar).
Fig. 1. 2D tags. Left: laser printer. Right, InfoDot acrylate laser-etched 7 mil pixel, 3/8 inch tags.
A significant amount of data can be placed into a single 2D tag. As a test I placed about four kilobytes of text into a tag and was able to read it with no trouble at all. The resulting tag ended up being close to two inches on a side, and that appeared to be close to the maximum physical size that my tag reader could handle. But usually a smaller tag will do just fine for inventory management.
Asset and inventory management
The proper management of assets and inventory is important in just about every sector, both public and private. My company's office building consists of approximately fifteen offices, two conference rooms, and an area for cubicles. In each of these rooms are found company assets: desks, chairs, fax machines, tables, computers, and all the other things you will find in a typical office. Each item must be inventoried for insurance and other business purposes. Each item must be identified as to location, user (where appropriate), and, in our case, whether the company or the government owns it, as we contract to the Department of Defense. That inventory could be kept on paper, or in an Excel spreadsheet or Access database.
My company writes software and maintains Web sites for the military. If we manufactured electronic assemblies and sub-assemblies we would find ourselves in need of an asset management tool. Again, the 2D tag would be the perfect tool for the job. However, we might find ourselves in need of creating relationships between assemblies of components, i.e., parent/child relationships.
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