Re: Re: [MLUG] printing barcodes

["Mark Rages" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 11/18/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Nov 2006, Jonathan King wrote:
>
> > On 11/18/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> >>
> >> Very nice.  I will also have to check into this:
> >>
> >> http://www.ashberg.de/php-barcode/
> >>
> >> I think we will be using mostly PHP with MySQL, so a PHP method for
> >> generating an image on the fly seems reasonable.  I'm just not sure how
> >> people should be printing these things for use on lab specimens.
> >> We'll want something fairly automatic and error proof.
> >
> > So the one thing that *is* probably very worthwhile are these little
> > barcode/text printers that will generate labels for things on the scale
> > of (say) 1.5 ul tubes. My guess is that you can find one that will let
> > you talk to it fairly directly, kinda like the interfaces you can get to
> > thermocyclers and such.
>
> Thanks, Jon.  I see this as a fairly important piece of the system I am
> writing about today.  The best thing would be for the barcode to simply
> appear, printed, when the user clicks on a certain button on a web page.
> It seems like that might be achievable, but right now I can see how to
> produce the image in the browser window, not how to send the correct data
> to the printer.  That might be a trivial problem for someone who
> understands these printers better than I do.  (Maybe this could be done by
> creating a certain type of file on the fly, like a .bar file, say, and
> this would then "display" in a program on the user end which would
> automatically print the barcode.)  Anyway, if anyone on this list has made
> this kind of thing work, and you have a sec, let me know about it.

I did something like this at Home Movie Depot.  I wrote a little
webserver in Python to run on the machine with a label printer
attached.  So the "real" webpage could just request an image from this
webserver, which had the side effect of causing a label to be printed.

You can buy ex-UPS Zebra printers on ebay for less than $50.  They use
thermal labels, so ink supply and maintenance is not a problem.  The
spec to drive them can be downloaded from Zebra's site (after a
painful registration process).  Normally, you communicate to them in
their special code. The special code isn't hard to put together.  A
typical label will be a few dozen ASCII characters. I also wrote a
driver to print to one as a normal printer using Ghostscript, but it
is much slower to print.  The bottleneck is sending graphics over the
slow RS-232 connection.

> It looks like barcode printers sell for about $400, or more (even much
> more if you want), and then we have to buy cartridges and labels.  My
> guess is that the price is high because these things usually see a ton of
> action -- thousands of labels per day sometimes.  We only need to print
> something like 10 per day, max, but it will be nice to have the
> reliability that these machines must offer.

Yeah, look on ebay for a retiered Fedex or UPS Zebra printer.  These
are "leased" to a business that ships a lot of packages, but they
usually don't want 'em back after the lease.  Google for "thermal
printer labels" to see the kind of labels you can buy.  At Home Movie
Depot we ended up getting some custom-made.

If you get one from ebay, make sure it comes with the power supply.
They are a weird voltage and not easy to find.

> Thanks again, to all of you.  This MLUG list is fantastic!
>
> Mike

Sorry my answer is a bit chaotic.  Maybe I'll try again after I get coffee.

Regards,
Mark
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