Has anyone tried to make a reader for tube-racks? They all seem so simple (box w/LEDs & camera). I’m just curious, since they are absurdly (but not unexpectedly) expensive.
It can’t be that hard to make, no?
Just a bed scanner and some software to output a file with locations and barcodes. I suspect Claude could have working software within a half hour.
To you question, no, I’ve never tried. I last purchased a scanner from Ziath for ~$5k.
We spent a bit of time on this (looking into it as a potential product). You can get something working pretty well with a Raspberry Pi and a couple of little cameras. Illumination turns out to be fairly challenging as the glare on those shiny little 2d barcodes is difficult to completely elimiinate.
I worked on a similar project before, using an industrial camera, OpenCV for image processing, and ZXing for decoding and encoding 1D and 2D codes.
It was really interesting to see hundreds of mixed 1D and 2D code types decoded in just a few seconds. Plus, when placing these 2D codes in a rack, position data can also be extracted.
No special lighting was used—standard room lighting was sufficient. As long as the environment isn’t extremely dark or overly bright, the system reads the barcodes reliably, thanks to basic OpenCV image preprocessing prior to decoding.
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