Cuecat

Why stop at two post on IDs, here’s a third.

The cuecat is a cheap “wand” style barcode scanner with an semi-interesting history. The end of the story is that the company went bust, and they’re now fairly cheaply available.

I got one for ~AU$30 from librarything.com. I work with books, and real barcode scanners cost an arm and a leg, so I justified it as a useful work expense.

It’s USB, and appears as a keyboard to the computer, so no special drivers are required. The one hiccup is that it returns an obfuscated code. No worries, the decoding algorithm is simple and available all over the net.

Here’s a ruby version:

gem install cuecat

Is the code from a cuecat?

    puts CueCat.valid?(".C3nZC3nZC3n2CNjXCNz0DxnY.cGen.ENr7CNT3Chz3ENj1CG.")
    => true

Is the code an obfuscated EAN13?

    puts CueCat.ean?(".C3nZC3nZC3n2CNjXCNz0DxnY.cGen.ENr7CNT3Chz3ENj1CG.")
    => true

Extract more detail from the code:

    code = CueCat.new(".C3nZC3nZC3n2CNjXCNz0DxnY.cGen.ENr7CNT3Chz3ENj1CG.")
    puts code.code_type
    => "IBN"

    puts code.id
    => "000000005112157601"

    puts code.value
    => "978184354916"

API look familiar? It’s more or less the same as my oodles of other ID gems.