[yellowapple]

In this particular case, it's not too surprising. PC-connected barcode scanners traditionally use a relatively-ordinary RS232 (or USB nowadays, usually with support for either depending on which cable you're using), and almost always just pretend to be ordinary keyboards. I'd be more surprised if it deviated from that at all.

I was kinda hoping that this would be someone porting Nerves to run on the barcode scanner itself; quite a few of these scanners actually have reasonably-powerful ARM cores (especially once you get into the 2D scanners).