Other Cool Stuff

Estimating and Project Management

On this page, I'll talk about some things that I think are worth a look.

Point of Sale

At work, I've been looking into the idea of setting up our store on a POS system. Problem is, we sell so many things that this would be a monumental system to implement, and it would cost a bundle, not only in hardware, but software too. But I was browsing the net a while ago and came across the Dale Harris "Cash Register" software. This is a free DOS program that will turn your computer into a cash register. I decided to try the system on our swimming pool department, so I installed the software on an old computer and started setting it up.

The system seemed to work well, using an old dot matrix printer for receipts, but how could it be better? How about a barcode scanner? I found some info about the "CueCat" scanner, which is a free gizmo that was supposed to be a big deal about a year ago. Companies were giving the thing away, and there was plenty of info on the net about how to trick it into becoming a decent barcode scanner. I went by my local Radio Shack, and sure enough, they just handed me one for free. I tossed the software that came with it, opened it up, and made a couple of cuts on the circuit board. Unfortunately, the "CueCat" may be hard to find now, since the company stopped offering them I think. I went back to Radio Shack and asked for another one and they told me they had destroyed them all.

But anyway, we now have a POS system for our pool department complete with barcode scanner that didn't cost a dime. Sweet. There's a few caveats, however. The "Cash Register" software is limited to 5000 inventory items, and it's not networkable. So, while this system won't work for our entire store, it's a good way for us to get our feet wet with POS and hopefully learn some things that will help us when we do decide to put the whole store on a POS system.

Update:

The computer I've used for this system is a very old 486 with something like 32 megs of RAM. It was running Windows 98, but since Microsoft decided to discontinue it, I had to do something else. Windows 2000 was out of the question on this hardware, so I decided to try running it on Linux. After some experimentation, I managed to get it working. The system now runs Debian Linux and uses software called "dosemu" to emulate a MSDOS environment. The POS executables and data files are stored on a central server (which also runs Debian Linux, by the way). By creating some simple startup scripts, all the user has to do is log in as "pos" and the network connections are made and POS is launched. Everything - including the printer and barcode scanner, still works too. Pretty slick.