I'm starting a project at work where the workers are supposed to get a scanner to scan barcodes on the vares that they use. Optimaly we would have a system supporting this, but we don't.
My thought is to be able to have excel running in the background on the computer they use to several other things, like reading newspapers and looking up todays weather etc. My understading of scanners is that they work just like a keyboard when connected to a computer, problems may then arise if someone is scanning barcodes, and another one is reading the newspaper in internet explorer, maybe the barcodes pops-up as a number in the URL(?), when it really should go to a specific cell in excel.
My question: Is it possible to make a scanner always return its values(scanned barcodes) to excel, EVENTHOUGH the computer may be used to something else at the same time?
Thanks for every thought and comment!
Have a nice weekend!
I do not think Excel would be the best solution to achieve this. It may be possible to achieve by linking to the scanner API and leveraging external libraries to listen for the scanner port etc. However, these kind of applications best be installed as system services e.g. Windows Service or as any other background application in .NET, Java, Python whatever. Excel is not the first choice technology to do these sort of things. Excel, however, can well be used for outputing this data.
What is more, honestly, the solution and feasibility will depend on the scanner API or driver.
Related
To begin with, I understand that Microsoft offers no way to programatically alter the (modern) start menu - on purpose.
Nevertheless, I'm looking for a way to still do it. I might use it to make a tool to sync the start menu between devices - or to automatically place often used items into thematically sorted groups (office, games, tools). The reason is that I have multiple devices, and really suck at manually managing the start menu - so I just use search or the alphabetic list most of the time.
So, does anybody know how to programatically add, remove, edit tiles? I could imagine solutions including:
Using undocumented APIs (can you still call it an API if it is not documented?)
Directly editing the tile database (e.g. TileDataLayer) - downside is that it seems to be a binary format, which is not known, and you'd have to restart the shell for changes to take effect.
Hooking DLLs or poking around in memory - yikes - but not worse than what other "desktop modding" tools like WindowBlinds would do
Using accessibility APIs, or faking mouse/keyboard input - this would most probably work, but it would be a bit spooky seeing the cursor move around, and it seems even more frail than the others.
I searched a bit, and think there is probably no solution available right now, but you can see this as a challenge to come up with a solution :-)
As you say, there isn't a way to do this.
As an alternative, did you know that you can easily find apps to launch by pressing the windows key and then typing the name of the app you want to launch? This is how I launch anything that isn't pinned to my taskbar. The device I'm on and the order of items in a list or what's pinned where become irrelevant when working this way.
I'm looking for an example of multi-threading implementation inside the game toolkit? I have the MultiCube example, but that is for WinForms and I use WPF, and I can't use the game toolkit tools from Direc3D11 because I need an instance of the GraphicsDevice. The MultiCube example is not displaying anything but a black screen, I tried it on several computers. My video card doesn't support command lists, don't know if that has anything to do with it. I was wondering how many models can SharpDX handle, because I have to draw hundreds of small
scaffold couplers, and after adding about a 100 on the default GraphicsDevice, the application slows down and gets locked. Any help would be appreciated.
Regards,
Haris
I was looking for the same thing but I couldn't find any examples. I tried converting the MultiCube example to use the toolkit and got it basically working, still very messy at the moment and needs optimizing, but at least it renders.
https://github.com/PlehXP/SharpDX-Samples/tree/MultiCubeToolkit/Toolkit/WindowsDesktop/MultiCube
I'm a Linux and gnome user, and I'm currently depending mainly on a notebook, and not surprisingly, I am not satisfied with the power quandary, so i recurred to power-management tools available for my system (currently Linux Mint 11), which is a really simple gui (gnome-power-preferences) with really few really basic features, which I'd love to expand.
I do not intend to work at low level features of power management, the states the are currently available are enough (suspend, hibernate, shutdown, do-nothing, monitor-brightness, downspin-hd, etc...), what I really need is a better way to create conditions in setting those states, which is, in the standard native tool, time and lid-closing, that's extremely limited.
So the question, I want to know what are my options to create scripts in any language(I'm willing to learn if i don't already know) that allow me to take a wider control of power-management conditions, i was think of(my possible settings):
down-spin disks immediately after lid closing and cut connection after n seconds.
don't cut connection after n seconds of lid-closing if bandwidth use is bigger than x bps
provide more statistical tools based on programs using, programs in background... services, etc.
create, save and load profiles that would automatically set monitor brightness, sound volume, wireless power, resource limits, etc... ex: 'college_ba.pp', 'default_ac.pp'...
brightness adjusting based on webcam shot illumination.
suspend or hibernate based on webcam shots without face for n seconds
etc
It may sound impossible and hard, I do not intend to have these stuff ready-to-use, as I said, i intend to use as much manual effort as needed, I just want to avoid low-level with existing libraries and tools, as much as possible, and i wish everyone to share information about any library, tool or project that comes to mind and deal with any subset of these things I've cited in this question.
This is a thing that i want from a long time, and just now i realize that this community could help me wide my options. My English is horrible I know, i learned online. I'm familiar with C++, C, Python and lately bash scripts. Thanks.
Your next step is to learn D-Bus, since most of the tools, both user and system, communicate using it.
Many sites and articles on getting widescreen monitors to work on notebooks in their native resolution mention something called the "Mode Removal Table" in the Video BIOS which specifically prevents certain video modes:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=947830
http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/showthread.php?t=61326
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/313573-xps-m1330-hdmi-hdmi-tv-issue-2.html
http://forums.entechtaiwan.com/index.php?action=printpage;topic=3363.0
Does such a thing really exist? The fix worked for me but I wanted to find out if I can read, modify, or work around this table. However I can't find any mention of it in the various VESA standards. Perhaps it actually goes by some other more cryptic name?
“Many sites and articles”? The first couple of dozen results are from you, and most of the rest are from that Intel article you mentioned or other people linking to that article.
You could always try asking someone who talks as though they know how to do it. There's another thread that discusses it—though it too has no information on the table, only a quick mention of it.
There does not seem to be any currently known way to read the GMA video BIOS. You would have to dump the BIOS and reverse-engineer it to figure out where the table is and how to interpret it. Unfortunately, even extracting it is difficult since nobody seems to have had enough interest in creating a tool to automate it. Looks, like you’ve got even more reversing to do. (Techincally, because the GMA is an integrated graphics-adapter, you'll need to extract the video BIOS from the system BIOS, then extract the table.)
I want to code a trading bot for Magic: The Gathering Online. This bot should wait until someone offers to trade, accept, look through the cards available from the other trader (the information is shown on screen), and perform other similar functions. I have several questions:
How can it know that someone is offering a trade?
How can it know that the other trader has some card (the informaion is stored in pictures)?
I just cannot imagine right now how to do it, I have no experience with it, until now I've been coding only console programs for my physics neсessities.
First, you should note that some online games forbid bots, as they can give certain players unfair advantages. The MTGO Terms of Service do not seem to say anything about this, though they do put restrictions on anything that might negatively impact the service. They have also said that there is a possibility they will add an API in the future, so they don't seem to be against the idea of automation, but are not supporting it at the moment. Tread carefully here, but it looks like it should be OK to write a bot as long as it is not harmful or abusive. This is not legal advice, and it would be a good idea to ask the folks who run MTGO for permission. edit since I wrote this, it has been pointed out that there are lots of bots already, so there should be no problems writing bots.
Assuming that it is not forbidden by the terms of service, but they do not have an API, you will have to find a way to detect what's going on, and control the game automatically. There's a pretty good series of articles on writing poker bots (archived copy), which has some good information on how to inject a DLL into an application, scrape the screen, and control the application. That might provide you with a starting point for doing this sort of thing.
You might also want to look for tools that other people have already written for doing this. It looks like there are several existing MTGO bots, but they all seem a bit sketchy (there have been some reports of them stealing passwords), so be careful there.
Edit
Since this answer still seems to be getting upvotes, I should probably update it with some more useful information. Since writing this, I have found a great UI automation system called Sikuli. It allows you to write programs in Python that automate a GUI. It includes image recognition features which make it very easy to recognize buttons, cards, and other UI elements; you just take a screenshot, crop it down to include just the thing you're interested in, and do fuzzy image matching (so that changing backgrounds and the like doesn't cause the match to fail). It even includes a custom IDE that allows you to embed those screenshots directly in your source code, so you can see exactly what the code is looking for. Here's an example from the documentation (apologies for the code formatting, doing images inline in code is not easy given StackOverflow's restricted subset of HTML):
def resizeApp(app, dx, dy):
switchApp(app)
corner = find(Pattern().targetOffset(3,14))
drop_point = corner.getTarget().offset(dx, dy)
dragDrop(corner, drop_point)
resizeApp("Safari", 50, 50)
This is much easier to get started with than the techniques mentioned in the article linked above, of injecting a DLL into the process you are debugging. Sikuli runs entirely at the UI level, so you never have to modify the program you are automating or worry about changes to the internals breaking your script.
One thing it is a bit poor at is handling text; it has OCR features, but they aren't all that good. If the text is selectable, however, you can select the text, copy it, and then look directly at the clipboard.
If I were to write a bot to automate something without a good API or text-based interface, Sikuli is probably the first tool I would reach for.
This answer is constructed from my comments.
What you are trying to do is hard, any way you try and do it.
Arguably the easiest way to do it is to totally mimic the user. So the application presses buttons, moves the mouse etc. The downside with this is that it is dependant on being able to recognise the screen.
This is easier if you can alter the games files as you can then just skin ( changing the image (texture)) the required cards to a single unique colour.
The major down side is you have to have the game as the top level window or have the game running in a virtual machine. Neither of which is ideal.
Another method is to read the processes memory. You may be able to find a list of memory locations, which would make things simpler, otherwise it involves a lot of hardwork, a debugger to deduce the memory addresses. It also helps (a lot) to be able to understand assembly.
The third method is to intercept the packets, and alter them. This is easier that the method above as it (at least for me) is easier to reverse engine the protocol as you have less information to deal with. It is just a matter of setting up a packet sniffer and preforming a action with one variable different (for example, the card) and comparing the differences.
The thing you need to check are that you are not breaking the EULA. I don't know how the game works, but most of the games I have come across have a EULA that prohibits (i.e. You get banned) doing any of the things I have mentioned.