Success with the CipherLab 1000!

Brought the crappy cipherlab 1000 barcode scanner home tonight - thought I'd have another go at getting it working.



So maybe they've improved the downloadable manual (or maybe I just read it better this time....) I'd completely missed the really obvious:-



When you use 'Scan Manager' s/w to 'configure scanner' - and you change lots of settings, then see that they've been changed - then try scanner in Word for the 100th time (only to get gobbledeegook) - maybe its because you haven't configured scanner. A good test of this (which I did tonight) is change the 'beep' frequency on the scanner. Lo and behold - no change when you try scanner.



Hang-on - why does it keep trying to talk to scanner over RS232 when you go 'download settings' - its not connected via rs232 - only via keyboard...?!?



DOH! The only way to 'configure' the scanner from the scanman program is to PRINT OUT CONFIGURATION BARCODES THEN SCAN THEM IN!!!!



Ok - so I'm an idiot for not realizing this earlier - but this is like so 80's tech!



Anyway, set the scanner up to recognize EAN13 barcodes and to convert to ISBN. Works a treat on all my UK books (that either are just ISBN or EAN13 beginning 978...). Haven't quite got it setup for American books yet - but will.



The other nice thing is that it stores its setup in Non-Volatile memory - so you only need to program it once.



Also downloaded latest Microsoft VB.Net Express Beta 1 tools - plan on writing Amazon Web Services application (as the VBA word AWS routing doesn't work on my desktop as I only have old Office 2000 I think)