Barcode automation for mobile payments

[jago25_98]

 Problem:

You wish to pay a friend with Bitcoin.
 
You have saved your password for MyBitcoin.com except for the last 3 letters into your mobile phone memory to save time,

 but the Bitcoin address is still very long to type in.

How can this be better?

 Barcodes.

There are 2 sections to this problem:

1) Generate a barcode for a bitcoin address.

2) Read a barcode using a mobile phone camera.

There are apps that can read barcodes (http://scan.jsharkey.org/) but what I'm looking for is one that runs in the background and types in the barcode number into the webbrowser. I haven't found that yet. Here's a starter on how you might make that:

You don't need an Android phone to make an Android app. See this article:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Run-Android-Applications-on-Ubuntu-115152.shtml

You can run an emulator on your linux or Windows box straight away, including using a PC connected webcam (see http://scan.jsharkey.org/ )

Somebodies already on the barcode scan API:
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

It should be a simple feat to use that for copy the results from zxing into the copy/paste buffer for easy copying into the web browser.

2) Making your own Bitcoin address barcode.

Here's the list of barcode types useable with zxing:
    * UPC-A and UPC-E
    * EAN-8 and EAN-13
    * Code 39
    * Code 93
    * Code 128
    * QR Code
    * ITF
    * Codabar
    * RSS-14 (all variants)
    * Data Matrix
    * PDF 417 ('alpha' quality)
    * Aztec ('alpha' quality)

I'm now looking up how to make these....

[1714039217]

1714039217

[1714039217]

1714039217

[1714039217]

1714039217

[1714039217]

1714039217

[tcatm]

Have you seen my js-remote ( http://tcatm.github.com/bitcoin-js-remote/ )? It supports QR codes.

[jago25_98]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/android-barcode-scanner/
^ This cuts down the barcode scanning to Python. The only thing missing is the copy to copy buffer command at the end.

Just reading that link tcatm.... oh my goodness! No I didn't know about that, that's fantastic, great work, couple of coins on the way to that

Looks like no.2 is solved then.

[davux]

You might also be interested in python-bitcoin's qrCode() method on Address objects.

Example code:

Code: (Python)

from bitcoin.address import Address
from bitcoin.controller import Controller
Controller('myuser', 'mypassword')
Address('17E9BE8HwnPbV1JDFPnUvVWCQo9pBWjdAY').qrCode().save('/tmp/code.png')

Please read the method's documentation to see all the possibilities of the Address object, and of the qrCode() method in particular.

[cindy313]

 Problem:

You wish to pay a friend with Bitcoin.
 
You have saved your password for MyBitcoin.com except for the last 3 letters into your mobile phone memory to save time,

 but the Bitcoin address is still very long to type in.

How can this be better?

 Barcodes.

There are 2 sections to this problem:

1) Generate a barcode for a bitcoin address.

2) Read a barcode using a mobile phone camera.

There are apps that can read barcodes (http://scan.jsharkey.org/) but what I'm looking for is one that runs in the background and types in the barcode number into the webbrowser. I haven't found that yet. Here's a starter on how you might make that:

You don't need an Android phone to make an Android app. See this article:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Run-Android-Applications-on-Ubuntu-115152.shtml

You can run an emulator on your linux or Windows box straight away, including using a PC connected webcam (see http://scan.jsharkey.org/ )

Somebodies already on the barcode scan API:
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

It should be a simple feat to use that for copy the results from zxing into the copy/paste buffer for easy copying into the web browser.

2) Making your own Bitcoin address barcode.

Here's the list of barcode types useable with zxing:
    * UPC-A and UPC-E
    * EAN-8 and EAN-13
    * Code 39
    * Code 93
    * Code 128
    * QR Code
    * ITF
    * Codabar
    * RSS-14 (all variants)
    * Data Matrix
    * PDF 417 ('alpha' quality)
    * Aztec ('alpha' quality)

I'm now looking up how to make these....

there seems many barcode scanning app for phone , which one to choose is the best way  to do such a thing ？

[enriquez]

I made a QR Code scanner for iOS that does what you describe (along with an HTML5 wallet). It works by using custom url schemes.

Demo: http://youtu.be/D0NmeVEz70c

The above video shows tapping the Scan Code button to launch the scanner app with a callback url. After it scans, it launches the callback url with the QR Code data that the web app can use to populate text boxes.

I posted more details about the wallet and scanner here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=551986.msg6008008#msg6008008