I’m looking for a way to read a barcode from the photon. I found some topics in this forum about it but no concrete answers whether it is possible or not. So here is my question: has anyone try to connect a barcode scanner (PS/2, USB or UART) to photon and can successfully read out the barcode?
Since a bar code is an optical input you would either need a dedicated piece of hardware for barcode scanning that provides USB, UART, I2C, SPI etc connection … or … depending on your needs … take a different approach. The approach I once used was to use a Linux based microprocessor (eg. Raspberry Pi Zero or similar) and connect a $3 webcam to it. Then, you can install “ZBar” on the device. ZBar is a library for scanning bar codes, QR codes and more from the images captured from the webcam … that results in the “data” retrieved optically. While this would then say that you would have to couple a Photon with another MCU environment, in practice that isn’t complex. Alternatively, you could avail yourself of the Particle Cloud environment directly on the Pi (I’m new here but I believe that is possible) and run ZBar and the Particle environment concurrently on a Pi.
I would such googling on zbar and specifically reading:
That is possible 