Wednesday, June 6, 2007

80 bucks for LTO barcodes? WTF?

I got a brand new HP Autoloader with bar code reader. Very cool since I would no longer need to label the tape and label the tape in the backup program. You can probably imagine my astonishment when no labels were included. No problem... I'll just order a pack HP Q2008A... WTF? 75 euro's?

No way am I gonna pay that amount of money for a piece of paper. There has to be a way I can create my own. I checked the Quantum specs and this shouldn't be a problem. The labels use code 39 barcode encoding. They also specify the allowed characters (8 alphanumeric ending with L1 for LTO1, L2 or L3 for LTO3) for instance 000001L3 or WED001L3.



Ok, that is a start. So how am I going to generate the barcodes? Google is my friend and found me this site.

After some trial and error I discovered these settings work best:



Now all you need to do is create some barcodes and print them on label paper. Make sure you align the labels in the center of the space for labels like this:



In the picture above you can see where you can place the text label.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Bud we have the same issue with our Quantum loader. We use the 3of9 font inside Word and we are able to generate pages of labels. Print, Cut and use them no problem.

http://www.idautomation.com/fonts/free/

Chad

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

A while back I brought some software so that I was able to print out my own barcode labels. The software was not really that good as it would never properly create my barcode labels. In the end I found a British labels company who printed my barcode labels for me at a low cost. It saved me a lot of messing around really!

Anonymous said...

I needed to fit into an existing set of labels, so I used Chad's font in Word.
I compared it with the original labels, and nothing seemed to match, until I realized...they're all upside-down! I don't know why, but it works with our Quantum library.
I just flipped the user-readable numbers over, and the printout matches the original to a sub-millimeter level. We'll see if it works...

Chris Towles said...

Thanks for the Post. Saved us headaches and money.