WEB Enabled Electronic Component Vending Machine: - Omni-Directional Barcode Array Reader Module

Student: Adam Charles Degen

Supervisor: Richard Cocks

Category: Software Engineering Thesis Project

The supply of electronic components to students in a university environment in an efficient and timely fashion is a logistical nightmare. The tracking and replenishing of supplies is a costly and time-consuming exercise. The aim of the WEB Enabled Electronic Component Vending Machine project is to produce a distributed array of Internet Vending Machines suited to issuing small quantities of electronic components to individual students and recording each transaction to facilitate stock control.

The Omni-Directional Barcode Array Reader Module will be developed in this section of the project. The initial purpose of the vending machine system is to supply small quantities of electronic components to students at a lower cost. The components to be supplied must be stored in low cost storage containers that can easily be reused or replaced, however, the containers need to be uniquely identifiable to track the contents. The most effective way to identify such a container is with a standard barcode, which can be read with a standard barcode reader

A standard barcode reader requires the barcode to be in the same orientation as the barcode reader, in this embedded system this is not practical so a new solution was needed. A Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA) was used to read data from a scanner head, process the data and then produce resulting value of the scanned barcode. This solution is programmed in Handel-C and is able to recognise a barcode at any orientation.

Poster Presentation (PDF)

Thesis Document (PDF)

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