The Gadget Factory, co-designer of the Open Logic Sniffer, has a new portable barcode scanning kit based on the Papilio FPGA platform.
It is called the Papilio Barcode Genie kit or Barcode Genie for short. It is a kit for the Papilio One that makes it easy to capture barcodes and save them to a microSD card.
But what is most compelling about the kit is that it was designed from the ground up to be easily extended and hacked. There are three open 8-bit Wing slots that allow new hardware features such as wireless Zigbee, Ethernet, or touch screens to be added. The software is easy to hack because it is written as an Arduino sketch which allows easy changes and the ability to tap into the large Arduino code base.
The whole design is based on an FPGA that runs the Open Source AVR8 soft processor which means that the processor can be hacked to add new features such as multiple SPI masters or VGA controllers. In short, this unconstrained kit means that anything someone can dream up to do with barcodes is within reach.
The User Guide has much more detail about the sketch and the libraries used.
The kit can be purchased at the Gadget Factory.