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DeviantCodec

Member

Registered: 2016-11-13

Posts: 2

Inventory software for personal use

Im trying to build a storage room in my garage for my wife for christman. I figured i would add a little technical flare to it and allow her to keep track of the canned foods and things that she stores in the garage already. I ordered a barcode scanner, but I want to get an inventory program that can allow her to sit in the how and see what we have in stoarge. Theres a few other things that she can use it for but thats part of being married to one of theose cravy coupon ladies. Any help would be really appriciated!

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: Inventory software for personal use

Tellico is an open source solution for home inventory in the Arch repos, although it is more geared towards books, DVDs, etc. than canned foods.

Getting product names from the barcode UPC/GTIN is probably the biggest problem. Databases like http://www.ean-search.org/ean-database-api.html have free trial accounts, but if you scan many products a month you will probably have to pay them. And then you would need to create a data source to feed the online data into Tellico.

I am currently doing an inventory of all books, DVDs, and Blu-rays in the house and I ended up writing some Python scripts of my own after looking at various options (Tellico/Delicious Library 3/Readerware). The script gets book information from WorldCat xISBN, but I type in DVD titles by hand because that was actually faster for me than trying to implement the ean-search API.

DeviantCodec

Member

Registered: 2016-11-13

Posts: 2

Re: Inventory software for personal use

Thank you so much for that information I googled the best that i could on and off and all i could find were things like Odoo and the like. That will be awesome! im going to inventory all of it for her as part of the surprise. Python scripts are a good idea. Any advice on the best recource to learn it. I only know some c and c#  but i hear python makes the world go round these days.

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: Inventory software for personal use

The official Python documentation https://docs.python.org/3/ is an excellent place to start of course. The module index is also important reference about all the modules included in Python (the "batteries included" aspect of Python, which I like a lot).

But I think the best way to learn Python is by programming in it, starting with some basic example code from somewhere. E.g. for my inventory project, I knew I had to deal with ISBNs. So I searched GitHub for ISBN and found https://github.com/xlcnd/isbnlib (ISBN extraction and validation; also available from the AUR) and https://github.com/Iranon/ISBN-metadata (gets book metadata from WorldCat). Then I simply combined them. And when that worked I added saving metadata to a file (via the built-in pickle module) and HTML/CSV output. And I think a Python beginner could have basically done the same, just at a slightly slower pace perhaps.

So my advice is, look for simple, straightforward Python code that works and add features to it. And if you run into a progamming problem you really cannot solve on your own there is always Stack Overflow and similar sites.

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Inventory software for personal use

If you are inventorying books etc. I would go with calibre. It has an Add from ISBN option that pulls title/author/other from its standard metadata sources which includes worldcat, isbndb, and google books.

Many people use calibre to catalog their pbooks in addition to their ebooks.
(Some people even use it to catalog other stuff like music and videos, apparently calibre is a very good general catalog even without the book-specific features, or so they say anyway...)

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: Inventory software for personal use

If you are inventorying books etc. I would go with calibre. It has an Add from ISBN option that pulls title/author/other from its standard metadata sources which includes worldcat, isbndb, and google books.

I haven't looked at calibre, but my problem with Tellico was that it takes a lot of repetitive mousing-and-clicking when entering an item. You spend more time clicking around in the GUI than actually scanning barcodes. I assume calibre is the same; it's just how it is with GUI programs. Google Books has an entry for multiple ISBNs at the same time, but I did not want to use that.

With my batch mode approach on the other hand, I can simply scan dozens of barcodes into a text file and process them all at once. That way it feels more like the computer is actually doing some work too and not just watching me pushing the mouse around. :-)

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Inventory software for personal use

Nope, you get a box to enter ISBNs in, one per line, click OK, and then a batch job downloads metadata and adds them as new books (without an associated ebook format).

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: Inventory software for personal use

Nope, you get a box to enter ISBNs in, one per line, click OK, and then a batch job downloads metadata and adds them as new books (without an associated ebook format).

Well, then that's a far better workflow than I imagined.

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: Inventory software for personal use

P.S. Looks like there is now a barcode database for food items commonly sold in Switzerland. There are also photos and nutrition facts, e.g. https://www.openfood.ch/en/products/15204

That site even has a free API. This is probably not very useful for US users at the moment (not unless you buy a lot of European sweets at World Market that is ). Still, it's a very promising start I think. Tellico should integrate this.