The laser scanner is kind of fancy, but you can get USB scanners for $10-$20 that present as keyboards. For me, the most interesting part of this is looking at Elixir.
In my previous life I worked on kiosks using POS equipment like this. Scanners are typically just keyboard interfaces. The barcodes are essentially very old school QR codes that actually type the information. Card swipers are the same to a degree. They read up to 3 levels of the magnetic strip and essentially type the card number and cvc into POS systems. Debugging these usually would involve opening up Notepad in Windows and watching it type the information.
The Symbol/Motorola/Zebra/whoever-owns-the-brand-this-month li2208 is cheap and can read a phone display. I think it can decode PDF417 (? The 2D barcode on the back of your driver's license) but Im not sure about QR
I think by default it handles pdf417 but you could enable a few other formats through configuration. QR seemed to be easily supported by even the cheapest models 6 or so years ago. It's like the scanner tech itself kinda stayed the same but what changed was the connectivity to the PC, moving from serial to serial-over-usb. At least that's what it looked like with the sample scanners I had access to.
Do you have any recommendations? I've been looking to get one to play with the same concept as this article but I've never pulled the trigger on buying one as I'm not sure if there any quality aspects I need to be aware of. The shipping costs for my location are a bit too much to just try one. I can also imagine there's no real difference for that price range but I want to be sure before I order one.
Getting whatever is the cheapest one Amazon has listed at any given time has worked for me.
The only differentiation I can see is the really expensive ones can scan the tiny 2d codes that are silkscreened on some ICs, and the cheap ones are limited to about the same resolution that a standard consumer printer can print a barcode at. Unless you have some very specialized requirements, you should be good with just about any cheap barcode scanner.
Motorola are the respected brand, but it doesn't make a great difference. You might be able to get a local secondhand one. The more expensive ones do 2D barcodes, QR etc.
An important thing for secondhand ones is to download the manual; it will contain a set of configuration barcodes so you can factory reset it, turn off beeping, etc.
I've seen a website that has control codes for a particular scanner, because it doesn't just send digits/letters but the device can be controlled by special barcodes to send/hold Ctrl or Alt on the "keyboard". He was using it to access the OS behind the kiosk UI on a ticket machine.