Project Description
Given a little discipline, life can be far more organized. Virtually everything manufactured and sold at retail has a unique identifying number, its Universal Product Code (UPC), and is marked with a barcode image (see Figure 1) to let optical scanners read the code. Barcodes themselves are simply an optical encoding for information — it’s the combination of barcodes and a standardized information format, the UPC, that lets a scanner recognize objects from their barcode. The characters are encoded by the width of the vertical lines and spaces in most barcodes; the type shown in Figure 6-1 is a two-dimensional barcode. The differing line heights in the figure have no significance to the scanner.
The Anything Inventory project lets you inventory anything that has a UPC barcode, giving you the tools to read the barcode, identify the item, and store it in a database. Use it for your kitchen pantry, DVDs, CDs, bottles in the wine cellar, books in your library, a house insurance inventory, or most anything else. You can count how many of each item you have, and export your database in a format you can process with Microsoft Excel or most database programs.
FIGURE 1: Barcodes identify everything