GS1 Application Identifiers

The stated goal of GS1 (formerly the UPC Code Council) is to “develop and maintains global standards for business communication”. Their most widely know standard is for barcode labels. Here’s a sample GS1 barcode:

A scanner reading this barcode will  output “[C101189010720001501719083110LM123”.  The symbology above is Code 128 which has 106 different symbol patterns in it’s character set, three different start characters, three subsets (A,B, and C), and four function characters (FNC1 to FNC4) that are not printable that are used for special functions.

All GS1 barcodes start with a Start C symbol followed by a Function 1 character; scanners are supposed to interpret this a “[C1”, which indicates to the receiving software that the code follows GS1 rules.

The three pairs of characters enclosed in parenthesis are Application Identifiers; they tell the receiving software what type of data follows. Note that the parentheses are in the human readable only, they are not in the bar code itself.

A full list of AIs can be found here, but in the above example:

01 – Identifies the following data as a GTIN (Global Trade Identification Number)

17 – indicates an expiration date (YYMMDD)

10 – is a lot number, which is variable length field.

Note that if a variable length field (or more precisely, if the FNC1 is required by the GS1 tables) is in front of another field, a separator character must be used to signal the end of the field. This character can be a FNC1 or and ASCII group separator character (Hex 1D).

GS1 barcodes can also be Datamatrix codes; they follow the same rules as Code 128 except that the first three characters output are “[d2” instead of the “[C1” for Code 128.

CK3B CK3X CK71 and CK75 batteries

These four hand held computers from Intermec, now Honeywell, have used similar batteries:

From left to right

318-046-031 – Compatible with all CK series computers

318-046-001 – Compatible with CK75, CK71, CK3X

318-034-003 – Compatible with CK3X, CK3B

318-034-001 – Compatible with CK3X, CK3B

Note that the current CK3 battery part number is 318-034-023 (replaces the last two above) and the current CK7X battery is 318-046-031.

There is a new battery for the cold storage CK75, part number 318-046-032.