Adesso barcode scanners and Linux

After a couple of days being frustrated with a recently purchased Adesso NuScan 1000U barcode scanner I thought I'd put a few words together to show how I got it working under Linux.

Basically the unit looks like a keyboard, and uses the usbhid kernel module. When scanning a barcode, however, the unit would omit random characters during the scan. I tried using the programming manual to set delays in the transmission of characters (thinking that key debounce was the problem), but to no avail.

The problem turns out to be a USB HID implementation that works under Windows but not under Linux or Mac. The trick is to use the instructions on the Adesso website to put the scanner into a standards-compliant mode required for use on Linux.

The instructions for doing so are referenced in the Adesso Scanner FAQ and the barcodes needed are contained in this pdf document. It's a simple matter of scanning three barcodes in order, and you're away!

Hope this helps!

Linux collection manager software

My aim with the scanner is to catalogue my book library and other collections, so here's a short list of collection manager software I've found for Linux. You'll find some further reading on my Books page.

• GCStar
• Tellico
• Alexandria
• Palatina

All of these programs are fully optioned collection managers, but for simple input of ISBNs attached to a quick search engine I rolled my own in python using BeautifulSoup to do the web-scraping. It reads and writes the ISBN, Title and Author to a CSV file, which I plan to import into the other tools at a later date. There is also a CSV to XML converter to optionally write the scanned data to XML. Source code soon!