Jonasfj.dk/Blog
A blog by Jonas Finnemann Jensen

December 30, 2009
ZBar bindings for C#
Filed under: Computer,English,zbar-sharp by jonasfj at 6:58 am

gtkzbar-sharp-exampleAs part of the food management system my group made this semester, we wrote bindings for ZBar and based on those a bar scanning widget for Gtk#. Anyway, I figured it might be useful somebody else, so I’ve been using a few days cleaning up the ZBar bindings, extracting the Gtk# widget from our UI-mess and writing a simple example of how to use it.

The result is bindings for a subset of ZBar and a Gtk# bar scanning widget. I don’t intend to maintain the source, but if you find any bugs etc. or wish to start a project for the bindings, please leave a comment…

The example application using the bar code scanning widget can be seen on to right. Note: this was a really lousy webcam :). The check-mark appears when a bar code have been recognized and then fades away.

In Foodolini we used HAL to detect webcams as they were plugged, however, having heard that Ubuntu will be deprecating HAL, I didn’t care to clean up the source for this feature. If you interested it can be found in the source for Foodolini. And if anybody should happen to know how to detect webcams, distro independently, without HAL, please leave a comment…



December 20, 2009
Foodolini, A food management system
Filed under: English,School by jonasfj at 11:51 am

Now I’m done with my third semester at Aalborg University. The focus on this semester was software engineering with the Object-Oriented Analysis (OOA&D). Personally I found this subject rather boring, I guess making pretty diagrams trying explain technical stuff in a manner “mortals” can understand maybe utterly uninteresting 🙂

Anyway, for this project we analyzed, designed and implemented system for managing recipes and food in a common household. The system was suppose to compute nutritional intake and manage diets and exercises as well, however, these features were never fully designed and implemented. Nevertheless, it uses the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, to find the nutritional content of various groceries.

The system is called Foodolini and was implemented in C# on Mono using Gtk#, but also runs on .Net and Gtk# for .Net. Foodolini uses Sqlite as database, and we wrote a simple and neat ORM tool, inspired by SubSonic‘s SimpleRepository. However, the most interesting feature in my opinion is the bar code scanner used when registering groceries in the system. It’s implemented using a ZBar which captures and scans images from a webcam. I’ll be release C# bindings for ZBar and a Gtk# widget in an upcoming blog post, when I’ve cleaned it up a bit…

  • Foodolini 1.0.0 (sources, binaries and documentation)
  • Report (documenting the analysis, design and implementation of Foodolini)