Show HN: Giving a Broken Barcode Scanner a New Life with Elixir and Nerves

I love these little stories, they always make me want to go out and buy a proper oscilliscope so I can start my own adventures.<p>I&#x27;m surprised by how simple and easy to understand the data serialisation is on some bits of hardware as in this case.

The laser scanner is kind of fancy, but you can get USB scanners for $10-$20 that present as keyboards. For me, the most interesting part of this is looking at Elixir.

We&#x27;ve found Wunderlist to be truly amazing as a shopping list app, and my family has been throwing this type of idea around for a while, though instead of using a dedicated scanner we were thinking of just throwing together a simple app that used the camera and available barcode reading software that connected directly to our shopping list.<p>It&#x27;s nice to see that someone else came up with this idea, executed it so well.

At first I thought it was going to be a :cueCat goes to rehab article, but no... a legit barcode scanner. Nice!

Love this!<p>I was thinking of something similar, but mostly as an inventory + expiration tracking system, because we often forget what we have in the fridge and cabinets. I love the integration with Wunderlist for adding to the shopping list as well!

I would pay $100 for something like this. I want to just scan something, have it beep, and add to a shopping list. I know amazon has something similar but I don&#x27;t want to order it, just log it. Excellent project.

This is such a cool little project! I&#x27;m planning out a dedicated setup for my kitchen, particularly for recipes, but inventory management is another opportunity I&#x27;ve been wanting to explore.<p>Great writeup with detail!

Now, if only I can get Wunderlist to stop randomly duplicate my groceries list items or clear the wrong item when checking off... I can see why array indexing is a hard problem..

Where can I buy a scanner like this that is already hooked up to a todo-list?

I&#x27;m already nervous to try it out.