A variety of
PC card interfaces to interface from many different types of input devices to Personal Digital Assistants or
palmtop computers through PCMCIA slots. The disclosed interfaces can receive data in undecoded format from
laser based, wand based or CCD based
barcode scanning engines, decode the data to
alphanumeric characters and pass the decoded data to the PDA via the PCMCIA 68 pin
bus. Other
PC card based interfaces are also disclosed which can accept input data in the form of
ASCII or EBCDIC characters from virtually any type of
input device which a standard serial or parallel output or custom output
bus and input that data to the PDA through the PCMCIA
bus. Some embodiments use programmed
general purpose microprocessors to decode undecoded
barcode scan data on the
PC card. Other embodiments use custom-programmed, commercially available
barcode decoding chips to decode incoming undecoded barcode scan data. Some embodiments of PC card interfaces sample undecoded barcode scan signals and pass the samples to the host through the PCMCIA bus for decoding by a suitably programmed host computer.