Hello, I thought I would give a unbiased opinion on the Android and Saveo triggers. To give you a little background at where I am coming from; we have been using Mc55's since 2010. I have spent countless hours troubleshooting the wifi network, tweaking network profiles on the scanners,uninstalling and reinstalling NSCAN, find the best lighting for the lasers to read barcodes and we finally had enough. We decided to finally ditch the old tech and try something new.
The installation process was very easy if you are familiar with installing apps on your phone. If not your familiar with the installation of apps, the instructions are pretty well written. The trigger setup and paring was again fairly easy too. Setting up the NSCAN profile was straight forward. It did take a minute to get the profile to update, but when it does the first time, you are good to go.
The phone wifi is extremely stable even without MAC filtering and a full lobby of patrons. I did still leave broadcasting off for the SSID. I have not had any disconnects or drops. The processing speed is very fast. The triggers seem to work perfect. The lighting has no effect on reading the barcodes (crazy I know). We opted for actual phone cases to be mounted on the triggers (Does require the person at the end of the night to make sure the charging cable is tight).
The downside is that the screen display will go to sleep. So, we tried setting it the max and it seemed to complicated to explain to the usher core how wake the screen up. To solve this you could try and find a screen app to keep your phone awake. They all seem to complicated and did not work or had ads popping up, but there may be one out there on google play. So, I slapped together a simple app the do the job for us. If you want to try it is the zip on my profile files called, "installer" (Please note there are two versions in the folder. The more professional version is called ScreenOn and NoSleepy was the test. THIS IS AT YOUR OWN RISK!). I have only tried it on GS5's and GS6's.
Overall, if you are in the market for scanners that actually scan you may want to consider Android phones and the Saveo triggers. I am certainly please.
Travis
Hey Travis.
This is super useful. We went with the Saveos after seeing them at the conference. We have Galaxy S5 phones. We constantly have problems with the scanners not scanning but they continue to beep as if they are reading the barcodes. The ushers are not always quick to notice this. I'm not sure it's a "sleep" issue but I will check out your app.
We do have dedicated NSCAN Wifi so I don't think that's an issue but I'm not sure how to check the stability anyway.
We were told that if we have issues with it not scanning to restart the app and reload the device profile. It doesn't seem like you guys have had any issues but every other night seems to be an issue for us with the scanners. Have you been told any other trouble-shooting ideas that we don't know about?
Thanks in advance.
Hello Adria, Make sure you disconnect and reconnect the bluetooth before every use and do a test scan (Do not forget to make sure the profile updated too.). Someone should check the all of them before every use. I do not know your wifi system, but I would review that too. Example, forcing disassocation at -X db. I am local so I could swing by if you really need help.
Hey Travis. I'm still having problems with my Saveos. I haven't been able to scan tickets at all. Some Saveos aren't uploading the profile even though I've reset them with the barcode in the NSCAN documentation. I changed barcodes at the beginning of the season because we thought it was the barcode design. Then I saw that the address for the NSCAN RAMP had changed. I updated that and I still cannot get the scanners to work. Any thoughts? Do you know if there are barcodes that will not work with SAVEOs? When I try to scan in TEST mode it says invalid scan value.
Not that I am aware of, but I would start with the basics and work to the barcodes to makes all scanners are talking and profiles are updating first. Then maybe do a batch ticket print and do a mail merge with dobsons barcode 128. If that works, then it most likely is the desgin/barcode. Feel free to call me.