[powvans]

I worked for an online retailer a long long time ago and this would have been nice to have at our packstations. The tech at each station consisted of a Linux desktop, a barcode scanner, a printer, and a scale. The commerce platform was web based and displayed the current weight on the scale on the pack page.

Originally the scale was connected via serial port to the desktop. A little Perl service we called "the scale daemon" exposed the current weight on some localhost port. The backend would constantly poll that service and the web browser would poll the backend to keep the value on the page up to date. It was a nifty solution albeit a bit clumsy and it meant running an extra piece of software on 50+ machines in a warehouse.

At some point our scale vendor stopped selling scales with serial connections or maybe it was that the PC vendor stopped including serial ports. It was 10+ years ago and I can't recall exactly. What I do remember is that the guy that wrote the scale daemon had moved on and I had to figure out how to make it work with USB. It was fun and probably not as hard as it seemed at the time, but wow, being able to get at that scale from inside the browser would have massively simplified things.