In all fairness, the ZXing project appears to be command-line oriented, thus getting the current version of it building from within Eclipse might be a stretch, so I’m not going to beat my head against the wall too long in trying to get that to happen. The Knol I referred to claims it once worked, and now that I know more about the minimum requirements to build it I might have better luck but if not, oh well.

Cheers…

Flash: yes, I see your point, though it’s more a point of curiosity for me (I think the Droid has variable brightness on this… it’s all as much about poking around just to poke around as anything else).

Autofocus: I can see that, though the ability to fix on macro focus would seem useful for a camera with a macro setting (for close items mine doesn’t really sharpen up until it’s at the AF near-limit). I may experiment more with that just to see if it adds any value.

I figured out how to adjust the viewfinder size. It’d be interesting to see that and the AF parameters as adjustable settings (is there no easy way to tell the native max resolution when planning for MAX_FRAME_WIDTH/HEIGHT?) It was nice having a larger field to work with.

PDF417 was a curiosity too… I got that working – not a huge value in daily use and I can see how it can eat processing power but it was nice to see it works.

All this comes back to the ability to build based on the information on the pages I found. In my experience, no information is better than wrong information, but if good info IS available it’s useful to have it out there. The Windows host build info is kinda broken, but as I’ve described it’s more in need of a bit of cleaning than anything else. Some things that stand out in my experience today:

WTK: it appears you *have* to have it installed and available to build in Windows. I haven’t delved into exactly why this is but the build totally fails without it. This is probably directly related to the way Proguard is installed since it fails when looking for that (and when both are installed as and where expected it works fine). Perhaps Proguard can be installed in another place, but it’s apparently dependent on the WTK-home setting. Also, WTK 2.5.2_01 is apparently the default now (thanks to a security update). Looks like the default path in Windows changes a bit, while the Unix version doesn’t (though it is the updated version).

build.properties – an example entry for android-home would be valuable, much like there is one for the other windows-possible entries. Likewise the WTK note above would be a useful (minor) fix to that Windows example path.

Environment: I’ve tried to strip this down to the most basic configuration possible to build from Windows for Android. The Windows-host-build gaps I found were not numerous but they were critical to getting this to build for Android (the Eclipse gap is another story – if I figure out a simple solution I’ll post it but I’m just glad to be able to build it at all right now).

Again, I spent a few hours hunting down all the extra bits and tweaks required to make this work. It’s not that the info is totally absent – it’s just scattered around in notes, comments and other places. Nor is it esoteric – what I did should be quite typical for most Windows hosts based on XP or later. Knowing what fundamental items are required to build for a given host/target combination is useful, and cleaning up and consolidating this info would be useful, especially to people who are new to a project (and especially with a Windows host – given that one must gather several bits together than might otherwise be standard in a “developer’s” install of Linux).

I’m very glad there’s a Windows host option here – I just wanted to get the word out as to how a newbie might make use of it.

Trust me, turning on the flash doesn’t work. The image comes out white at that range. We disable it explicitly on all devices, except the Behold 2 which doesn’t allow it.

The issue is not resolution, but focus. The scanner actually only looks at the pixels you see on your screen — that’s about 0.07MP.

And on that note, auto-focus is absolutely essential to a clean scan.

You don’t need WTK unless you are trying to build the J2ME client.

Yes none of us use Windows but I don’t know of any reason it wouldn’t work, except for Proguard, which doesn’t seem to work on Windows? You can build a non-optimized version or just switch to Linux.

Yes, we’re not repeating instructions for setting up your development environment, since it’s not project-specific and kind of depends on your platform and preferred way of working.