Hi, Travis from POSGuys.com. Today we're going to follow up a review of the DataLogic Heron
3430/3100 series. This is the color-changing model of their retail barcode scanner. I'm
going to show you how to do it in two ways. One is the fancy multi-color changing way,
so if you notice this barcode scanner here is going red, white and blue, it's alternating
between the two, every couple of seconds it's changing to the next color in the series.
And this is our solid color scanner, so right now it's a solid green. And to change it,
it's really easy, there is a color change barcode sheet that's available on our website,
I'll put a link right here, maybe here. And just download that datasheet, and what you're
going to have on it is the ability to turn off colors all together, so I'll disable all
the colors. Then, when you scan, it'll still light up the side when you get a good scan,
but besides that it'll stay dark. We'll turn it on, and then we'll pick another solid color,
so it's green right now, I'll switch to blue. You just scan the blue barcode, and now it'll
stay blue. If you want like pink, you pick pink and then it becomes a solid pink, or
if you want like lets pick yellow, then you've got yellow. So there's 9 solid colors you
can pick from. In order to do something a little fancier, you can select random pattern,
and it'll alternate between those 9 colors, it starts with red and then every couple seconds
it's going to cycle to the next color. So that's your easy to change color option. To
do more advanced programming, we're going to go over to the computer, and I'll show
you how to use the DataLogic Aladdin software to configure a series of colors to be used.
Okay, we're over here on the desktop, and I have the DataLogic Aladdin software running.
If you need it, visit POSGuys.com, go to the DataLogic Heron product, and in the dowloads
section, you can download the Aladdin software. What we're going to do right now is first
put the scanner into USB COM mode, so on our website as well there's a little barcode here
for USB COM. You're going to need to scan that first, and then in Aladdin, you can go
to "Search For One Device" and it should find it on COM, one of your COM ports, and it sets
the default variables. Additionally, if you do "Search On Connection" you'll see this
barcode on the screen, you scan that barcode with your scanner, and then it'll also auto-detect
it, and you can click this button here, "click to configure." And it will set it up. So it's
reading the values on the device right now, I've configured this scanner for red white
and blue, other than that it's pretty much at defaults. So here in the tab, you're going
to see RGB LED settings. If you come in and everything is closed, you go to "Reading Parameters"
and then go to RGB Led settings. The easy settings to do are select one of the colors
from the list, that's the easy thing to do there. If you select one of those, then you
have a solid color. But if you want to do a custom pattern, you're going to click this
button that says "set color pattern." So when you click that, you open up this little grid
diagram here that shows it. So what you're seeing right here is red is being displayed
for 2 seconds, then white is being displayed for 3 seconds, then blue is being displayed
for 3 seconds, then it loops back to the beginning, and it does it again. These arrows right here
are your transition times, so it's 2 second to white, 1 second to blue, 2 seconds to red.
If I delete this, we can start all over from the beginning. So you're coming in as blank.
You click "add" and you're going to get this interface here for picking a color, here are
some nice swatches. It appears that it can do any color, but some of the colors are going
to be pretty similar, if you pick like this pink, and this pink, when you look at your
scanner, you're probably going to see the same pink, it's not so precise that it can
show any color that you want, but it definitely will do a pink, a red, an orange, a yellow,
those will be distinctive. So the first thing you're going to do is select your color. You
can select from your swatch, you can also select from kind of this default Windows selector
for colors. You can also put in an RGB value. So if you're doing like a school store or
something and you know the RGB values for your color you can just kind of play with
these sliders and get it. So I'm going to go back to swatches, and I'm going to pick
a blue. So when you look down here, it's all in milliseconds here, your transition time
in this node, this is how long it's going to take to switch to this color. A 10 value
here is going to switch very fast, if you put 1000 in that's basically 1 second, 2 seconds
is actually kind of nice, then it transitions slowly. Okay, your holding time is how long you're
going to stay at the color, you can have a max here of 160 seconds, I'm going to do 4000,
so we're going to have 4 seconds on blue. This "back to" right now is greyed out, since
we don't have any other color selected. So I'm going to say okay, there's my first color,
I'm going to add one more, this time I'm going to use the RGB selector and I'm going to do
white. White is a maximum value for all colors, my transition time, we're going to stay on
this color, or we're going to transition to this color in 2 seconds, and we're going to
hold white for 4 seconds. So what I'm going to do now is set a "back to" color. So we're
going to select color 1, and then you can select how many times you want to loop, I
want to do infinite, so we're just going to rotate between blue, white, blue, white, blue,
white, an infinite amount of times. If you just want to do it once, you select once,
and you can go up to 14 times, or infinite. Say OK. And so I have my little diagram
here of what I want to do, you can add up to 5 colors, and then once you're ready, you
hit "write configuration." So it now loads it up to the barcode scanner. And once it's
done, you can close this window, and disconnect your scanner. You click close, and then right
up here is the disconnect scanner, and if you click that, then the scanner resets, and
now it's flashing between blue and white. If you need to edit it some more, you can
click the "connect to" device, you scan the barcode on the screen again, or if it finds
it by itself, you just click "click to configure" and then it'll get the values from the scanner,
and you can once again configure it. So that's the Aladdin software in a nutshell for changing
the color. You can do a lot of other things in here, if you want to load custom sounds,
then that's in it as well, it's under audio settings, you have to upload the tones into
the scanner, and then you can select which ones you want to use. There's also the ability
to do data formatting, so if you want to do certain pattern matching, like strip out zeros
out of UPC codes, and things like that, then you can do it in here. There's also advanced
drivers license parsing, so if you're going to be scanning the back of drivers licenses,
and want to get only the name and address, then you can configure that in here as well.
A very powerful tool, it takes a little while to get used to it, and don't forget to put
your device into USB COM mode before trying to use it, or else its going to try to infinitely
search for your device if it's in USB HID mode. So that wraps up our video on color
changing video on the DataLogic Heron. For more information on the Heron, or to download
the utilities, please visit us at POSGuys.com. Thank you!