Using a barcode scanner for shortcuts

[sillybomb]

I have a crazy idea...

I have a barcode scanner. & I have thought of common expressions and shortcuts that I use a lot.

My crazy idea was to create a laminated sheet next to my workspace and have the scanner connected to my hub so that I could just zap up those expressions/shortcuts/automator processes any time I needed quickly.

Except that I discovered that I can't create barcodes that contain any modifier keys e.g. command etc. or function keys and some symbols can't be coded as well such as inverted commas for creating expressions like loopIn

This crazy idea as born purely out of just wanting to play around and experiment at home + maybe improve my adeptness and pure laziness.

Wondering if anyone has any thoughts or had a similar experience I can draw on. It's a reach. I tried to ask this question on a "barcode coders" forum but seems like its not a very popular place for people to hang out, strangely.

[Mylenium]

You would still need some sort of plug-in that communicates with the scanner from within AE, so I'm not sure what you hope to achieve here. This seems a bit far fetched, to be honest, even more so when you consider how many panle-based expression utilities and such you can find on AEnhancers already that do the job just as well...

Mylenium

[Stan Jones]

I agree with Mylenium that there are better ways to do this.

But a scanner is really just an extension of your keyboard, and technically can do simple keystrokes.

Scanners are actually very complex and require their own form of programming. I did this for a simple retail inventory counting system, since I needed the scanner for reading actual barcodes, and scanning an "Enter" code worked fine.