We need a modern open-source barcode reader

[teolemon]

We need a modern open-source barcode reader. The best thing (zxing) is in maintenance mode, and the newer barcode scanners (scandit, mlkit) with niceties like neural scan, 90° scan, bortched barcode scan… are all closed source.

[d33lio]

I can't agree enough! Although, I should say it's crazy how good the best readers from Zebra are and especially crazy how good vision api's from Dynamsoft are! They can read up to eight PDF417 codes simultaneously!!

Tbh, barcode thermal printers need an open source print driver other than Cups. I've been working on a project that both involves printing custom labels with Data-matrix qr codes and scanning them. Unless you pony up $400+ for a Zebra printer that has a "direct print" api that allows you to bypass common print drivers - using Cups is a huge pain. In many cases (at least on macs) it's nearly impossible to use a web passthrough to your local cups driver and commonly submitting a sequence of jobs incurs a 3-5 second delay between jobs. I now realize why there are entire companies built on top of proprietary print drivers and RPC channels to talk to printers. It's not that surprising though, since most of this problem space has been dominated and solved by Point of Sale companies. I'd definitely be open to any suggestions as to how I could better integrate printing to a rollo and scanning from a scanner or mobile device in a react app!

[ksaj]

It would be interesting to train OpenCV on the different UPC / QR / etc. code formats, and have it capture whatever codes it sees (even multiple formats at the same time, which is pretty common in shipping) and send the images to a reader to be processed.

This would probably be a good Raspberry Pi project for someone thus inclined.

Edit: I found this project that says it can, so it's at least a 2-year old still-unanswered question of who will program it: https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2018/05/21/an-opencv-barcode-a...