You often hear manufacturers reference ESD when discussing scanners.  In fact, on the Honeywell Granit datasheet you’ll see under the “Environmental” section on the back:  ESD.  ±20Kv air discharge, ±8KV contact discharge

What does it mean and why is it important?

• ESD – electrostatic discharge – is the sudden flow of electricity between two objects resulting from two conditions:
  • Air Discharge.  A high electrostatic field between two objects when they are in close proximity.
  • Contact Discharge.  Direct contact transfer of electricity between two objects at different potentials.  This is similar to the above except you are injecting the shock directly into the computer. A typical example of this would be 20KV Air Discharge into a scanner vehicle mount.  The mount in turn passes an 8KV shock to the scanner.

• Kv is a kilovolt – or 1,000 Volts. And a volt is…um…a unit of measurement to define voltage.  Think of voltage, using a plumbing analogy, as water pressure.

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When you hear the term verification in regards to printing barcodes we are referring to much more than just making a readable barcode. Verification is a much more specific requirement for the quality of a 1D barcode or 2D symbol according to an agreed-upon quality standard. Not meeting these standards with your customers, be it Walmart or the DoD, will end up costing you in fines and time lost.

Lucky for all of us we have manufactures like Microscan who make verification easy so you can catch the barcodes that don’t meet the mark before they ever leave your facility. There are essentially 3 main things that can go wrong when printing a barcode that will lead to failing verification.

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Presentation mode gives customers the ability to scan barcodes without having to squeeze any triggers.  You “present” the barcode to the scanner and it scans.  Presentation mode uses ambient light and scanner illumination to detect barcodes.

There are two types of Presentation Modes:

1. Presentation Mode.  In this mode the scanner’s LEDs remain dim until a bar code is presented to the scanner.  When a barcode is presented & detected the LEDs turn up, the aimer turns on, and the scanner scans the bar code.   This mode tends to do a better job with bad barcodes.
2. Streaming Presentation Mode:  The scanner’s LEDs remain fully on and the scanner is always scanning.  When a barcode is presented the aimer turns on and the barcode is “scanned”.  This mode tends to scan good barcodes faster.  In Streaming Presentation Mode there is even a Normal flavor and an Enhanced flavor.
   • Normal = Good scan speed and the longest working ranges.
   • Enhanced = Fastest scan speed but less range.

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If you have trouble identifying your barcode types (like me) – here is a trick for you.

• Plug your scanner into your PC.
• Turn on Word.
• Go to page 199 of your Xenon/Granit User’s Guide and scan that barcode titled “Add Code I.D Prefix to All Symbologies (Temporary)”
• Then scan the barcode in question.
• You’ll see a character in front of the scanned data on your Word doc (or any app that displays scanned data).
• Go to the section of the chart below (Linear, 2D, Postal) then to the fourth column titled “ID” under Honeywell; find your symbol; and your barcode type is in the first column – Symbology.   This chart is also in the back of the Xenon/Granit User’s Guide.

Note: This setting is temporary and will be removed when the unit is power cycled.

Whether a business leapt at the opportunity to become one of the first suppliers with RFID tagged products or now finds itself currently being mandated to employ the technology, the implementation costs and the potential rewards are the same.

To maximize the benefits of RFID, it is critical to view its capability to drive business process improvement, increase supply chain efficiency and ultimately improve bottom line results. From this perspective, the up front capital costs for hardware, engineering consulting costs, opportunity costs, ongoing cost of tags and, in a manual environment, labor associated with the RFID tagging of products are deemed a necessary investment.

Rather than merely RFID tagging products to satisfy the requirements of their largest customers, companies can move from seeing RFID deployment as just the cost of doing business to an opportunity to enhance productivity and profitability. Understanding the impact of data collection and tracking as well as data integration is essential to RFID optimization.

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The Granit user guide has a performance chart that says – “Granit 1980i/1981i Scanner Typical Performance (200 lux).   So what is this “lux” thing?

Lux is the amount of ambient light in the area.  A full sun, no clouds in the sky, summer day would be considered about 100,000 Lux.  A completely dark area with no ambient light at all would be 0 Lux.  A typical office environment is usually between 500 – 700 Lux.  Granit scanner are used typically in a warehouse which are usually dimmer than offices.  It would be safe to say that a warehouse would measure about 200 Lux of ambient lighting.

Simple regular maintenance on your printer can be the key factor in getting the most out of your printer, printhead, and supplies.

The Sato CL4NX and CL6NX series of printers represents their next generation of thermal printers with advanced support for barcode symbologies, character sets and RFID encoding. A product of Sato’s global R&D network the NX Series incorporates value-added features in a world-class design to deliver a printing solution that goes beyond expectations.

There is a mode titled “Hand Held Scanning – Mobile Phone” that optimizes your scanner to read bar codes from mobile phones and other LED displays.  It does this in part by flickering the LEDs.  Last week a business was having trouble reading barcodes off of his laptop so we told him to turn the feature on (by scanning the barcode).  And of course he stopped having trouble.  Note that you don’t have to have this feature on when scanning barcodes off of phones/tablets.  It just helps the cause sometimes.

I wanted to know what the impact was on scanning speed when scanning regular barcodes when this feature was turned on.  So I tested it.

The results – the Xenon 1900 is a little slower (about 15%) with this feature turned on.  That sounds like a lot but the difference in speed really isn’t noticeable.  The Xenon still blows through my scanner board.

So don’t hesitate to use this feature if the application calls for it – even if other barcodes are being scanned that aren’t on a phone or a computer screen.

If your business is experiencing network performance issues and you suspect that the Bluetooth scanner is interfering with other devices, you can turn down the power output of the Bluetooth scanner by simply scanning a barcode.  There are four barcodes you can scan in the Xenon/Granit/Voyager 1452/1602g User’s Guides:

• Low Power (1%)
• Medium Low Power (5%)
• Medium Power (35%)
• Full Power (100%).

A by-product when you turn down the power output is reduced range between the scanner and its base/access point/host.  I get asked a lot about the Bluetooth ranges at those power levels – scanner to base station.  So I tested several scanners (because I am a scan-nerd), and here is what I found.  Measurements are approximation – RF isn’t exact.  Also - I stopped at 100 feet because that’s how big my yard is…and because I’ve never seen an application that requires the Xenon to scan that far from the base station.

	Xenon 1902G	Granit 1981i	Voyager 1452g
Low Power (1%) Line of sight between scanner and base With my body between scanner and base	35-40 Feet 10 Feet	35-40 Feet 10 Feet	20 Feet 5 Feet
Medium Low Power (5%) Line of sight between scanner and base With my body between scanner and base	>100 Feet 30 Feet	>100 Feet 30 Feet	40 Feet 28 Feet
Medium Power (35%) Line of sight between scanner and base With my body between scanner and base	>100 Feet >100 Feet	>100 Feet >100 Feet	75 Feet 50 Feet
Full Power (100%) Line of sight between scanner and base With my body between scanner and base	>100 Feet >100 Feet	>100 Feet >100 Feet	>100 Feet >100 Feet

Bottom line is that if you are really concerned about RF interference, don’t be afraid to turn down the power on the Xenon & Granit.  They’ll still have plenty of range. That being said, in the vast majority of cases, the interference has nothing to do with the Bluetooth scanner.

From WIP (work in progress) to the food and pharmaceutical industries, tracking items with unique serialized barcode labels is necessary to accurately and easily locate products in cases of a recall, customer alerts, expiration management, and counterfeit prevention. Proper serialization allows any business to know exactly where a problem starts and ends since each item has a unique, non-repeated barcode to identify it.

One of the many advantages of Seagull Scientific’s BarTender label software is fully integrated serialization capabilities. BarTender has multiple types of serialization options and once you have a data source configured, the value will automatically increment or decrement with every printed label.

For step-by-step guidance in how to setup serialization in BarTender download this convenient white paper