why was the wand made?

[ThomasF]

(08-11-2024 03:23 AM)John Ioannidis Wrote:  Has anyone bothered to disassemble the wand rom? How hard would it have been to write some extra code to read other common barcodes, such as UPC?

Yes, I disassembled the Wand ROM to be able to emulate the Wand with the Pico.
It is all described here.

In short, no it is not possible, all the bar decoding is done in hardware, the start and stop bars are removed, and the decoded bytes are sent to the ROM for checksum calculation and byte decoding.

To use another bar code format (I.e. different bar widths) is impossible without changing the hardware.

You could of course define new types of content, e.g. another checksum type, other kind of data (e.g. MCode data for a flash device), but the physical properties of the bar code must maintain the original format.

Cheers,
Thomas