Recently on a Make posting titled “CueCatLibraryThing & CueCats – Catalog your books” I was surprised to hear about the old “:CueCat”. I remembered that I had gotten one years ago and never did anything with it. So digging deep within one of my old boxes of junk I found it.
It is a Digital Convergence 68-1965-A version with a Rev 2.1 board inside. I modified it using the
How to Neuter a :Cat article and its Confuse-A-Cat sub-article along with the additional
Geek posting using the “blue” connection as shown in the picture. [Most of this work was documented in 2000 and some of the links on the internet no longer worked.]
When it was done I plugged it into the keyboard port and the keyboard into it and then tried it. Scanning the UPC on a book it spit out just UPC nothing else – very nice and the mod worked. Using
isbn.un I was able to scan a few books and find them on the internet. I thought maybe Kathy’s library of stitching books could be aided by something like this. So I showed her what I had done. Naturally she wants a complete library cataloging solution not just a simple scanner, but then it’s a start. So I need to look into
LibraryThing.com