Working With Bar Codes On The Cheap

I was looking thought all my old computer stuff and found my old Cue Cat reader. The great thing about the Cue Cat reader is that it lets you work with bar codes for under $20. Essentially the Cue Cat is an artifact of a defunct company that made a bunch of bar code readers back in the hay day of the internet. (See Wikipedia Link Below)

The Original CueCat's had protection on them preventing users from reading bar codes directly but you can find them on eBay with protection removed. Once the protection is removed, you can simply plug the Cue Cat reader in and scan a bar code right into anything that takes keyboard input.

I originally bought a Cue Cat reader because I wanted to keep track of my sodas since my roommate kept drinking them all. I whipped up a PHP page with a text box that always took focus and linked it to a MYSQL database for logging. The Cue Cat reader presses the enter key after reading every barcode so it automatically submitted the requests also which was cool.

I have not tried it but I also found a free bar code font if you want to make your own code.

CueCat Wikipedia
Barcode Font