Hello,

I need help in a subject which i know nothing about. Has anyone used some kind of optic scanners before? What we want is registering in the forms which are output from optic scanner to the web database, to be used for test results of students, candidates.

Any advises?

Thanks.

Can you be more specific?
What do you mean by optic scanner?

Do you mean like a barcoding system?

Hm. Something like a test with 5 checks maybe like A-B-C-D-E and students mark the reply, the scanner will read how many correct answers are and will record it in an appropriate format to link to a web database, i am not familiar with scanners so i am wondering if this is possible.

I would imagine you would need to buy the machine with the standard forms for this purpose as they use in educational institutions.

The few machines I have worked with could output the data in CSV format, which would be trivial to parse using php / perl /whatever for database insertion.

Hope that helps you get started.

Most of those scanners can connect to a computer via TCP/IP or RS232 (Serial) communication. There's also converter from RS232 to TCP/IP. (RS232 is max 50 foot)

What you need to do is

1) Establish communication between the hardware and the computer.
2) Develop a software that will receives answer from serial port or TCP/IP. This software will put the received answer into a database.
3) Replicate this database (if not the same) to the WebHosting server
4) Create reports.

I've done that kind of stuff (scanners, balance, terminals) quite a lot of time, and if you have some additional questions, just PM me.

Cheers,

Matt