The RESCO Electronics Blog

Most of you reading this will have purchased a home at some point in your life. In many respects picking a contract manufacturer for your company to partner with is a similar experience. You are making a major decision that can have a major effect for years to come and you have multiple stakeholders who all have different ideas about what is the best fit.  At the end of the day, you need to differentiate your “must haves” from your “would likes”.  And just as importantly, project what your must haves are going to be in the coming years.

When you are beginning the process of engineering a data collection platform, one of the most important steps is to utilize the barcode symbologies that best fit your requirements.  Here are some items for your team to consider when determining which symbologies to use:

In part 1 of this blog posted last month we discussed what an embedded barcode reader does
 and how the type of data desired to collect will determine the type of scanner needed and what aspects of engineering must work harmoniously for successful implementation.  Now we will focus on the latest trends with embedded scanners and the consequences of a bad reader choice.

In this two part blog series we will discuss the promise of embedded barcode reader options,
considerations for successful implementation, and the latest trends with embedded scanners.  We will start off by talking about what an embedded barcode reader does and how the type of data needed to collect will determine the type of scanner needed and what aspects of engineering must work harmoniously for successful implementation. 

In today’s competitive market, every company is looking for a cost advantage.  Sometimes that edge comes from working with your contract manufacturing partners to develop a lower cost design, other times it comes from finding off shore sources for sub-assemblies, or perhaps it comes from implementing cost saving inventory replenishment programs.   But what happens when these strategies are exhausted or just don’t generate the savings you need?  One often overlooked option is to work with contract manufacturing partners that can build higher level assemblies.  A few contract manufacturers like RESCO Electronics can take advantage of their lower cost structures, lower cost manufacturing facilities, and electro-mechanical expertise to lower your total costs by doing just that.

In June of 2015 the race horse American Pharaoh accomplished what no thoroughbreds horse had accomplished since 1978 by winning the Triple Crown. Engineers today are striving to hit a different triple crown with every design….Smaller Footprint, more capabilities and lower overall system cost. When designing an embedded barcode solution, one option that may allow your engineering team to meet these challenges is to utilize an embedded scan engine. We will look at some of the additional value a scan engine can bring to your design over a fixed position reader.

On June 26^th 1974, the era of barcoding began when the UPC code was read on a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum at a grocery store in Ohio. During the next 40 years, the use of barcodes has grown to where we see it in every facet of our daily lives including UPC codes on a gallon of milk, QR codes in magazine advertisements, and 2D codes on hospital patient’s wristbands that provides the caregiver with patient data. Over this time, the technology around the barcodes themselves, as well as the hardware, has evolved and continues to evolve today.