Will the Chromebook recognize a usb hand held bar code scanner?

jodymcl

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Aug 7, 2010
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Thinking about getting 50 chromebooks for my employees, but they will need to scan bar codes to google docs, anyone have success with this?
 

Daniel Bemowski

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Apr 28, 2015
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I wouldn't be so quick to say yes to this. I have tried 2 different styles of barcode scanners, IR and laser, and I had issues with both. While you can plug it in and hit the trigger, it will beep and register a scan with both, here are my findings.

The barcodes we were testing with were our property tags which are in the format of 012345, and I believe are code 39 format (Not 100% sure). I tried scanning into a google spreadsheet which would drop the leading 0's from the tags.

Infrared:
When I would scan something, it seemed like it was randomly picking a character in the barcode to display as the scan. It was never consistent, and I could not get it to accurately scan any barcode. I did not try any of the other settings for the scanner, so maybe that would help.

Laser:
The laser scanner would do better, with maybe one out of four that would miss one of the numbers. If scanning was rapid though, occasionally more of the barcode number was missed. This one too was only set at it's default settings and did not try any other settings.

When I tried the same two scanners on a PC scanning into Excel, I could scan super fast with each of them and neither would miss a thing or skip a beat.

FWIW....

Dan B.
 

Steve Byerly

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Jul 28, 2015
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I just started trying to use a scanner yesterday. It keeps changing the keyboard layout on scan, then altering what values are being input into the form field i'm scanning in to. I'm pretty sure these scanners input a tilda (~), so perhaps that's what's causing the shortcut. I'll be troubleshooting more today.
 

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