DPM Scanner Keyboard

BOMS

About this app

Turn any Android phone or tablet into an industrial barcode scanner keyboard.

DPM Scanner Keyboard is a full Android keyboard with a scanner built into it. Tap SCAN, point the camera at a code, and the value is typed straight into whatever field you were already in — your ERP, your MES, a spreadsheet, a web form, anything with a text box. No copy and paste, no switching apps, no losing your place in the form.

BUILT FOR DIRECT PART MARKING

Most scanner apps read printed labels. This one is built for the hard case: dot-peened and laser-marked Data Matrix codes on bare metal — steel pipe, castings, valves, machined components, tooling.

Those marks have no ink, no printed quiet zone, and are made of separate dimples rather than solid modules, which is why an ordinary decoder sees a field of dots and gives up. This app runs a ten-stage image pipeline against every frame — morphological closing to merge the dots into modules, adaptive thresholding, local contrast correction and scale normalisation — within a time budget that keeps the preview responsive.

A COMPLETE KEYBOARD, NOT A SCANNER WITH A FEW KEYS

A mark that will not read still has to be typed in. So this is a proper keyboard: full QWERTY, permanent number row, symbols, punctuation, cursor keys, and four layouts you can switch between.

- Industrial — QWERTY with a permanent number row and a full-width Scan bar
- Standard — familiar QWERTY with Scan in the bottom row
- Numeric — a large number pad with hyphen and dot, for digit-only identifiers
- Scan first — an oversized Scan target with a compact keyboard underneath, for gloves

Four key heights from Compact to Extra Large, because a gloved thumb and a small phone want opposite things.

FEATURES

- Data Matrix, QR, PDF417, Aztec, Code 128, Code 39, Code 93, EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A, UPC-E, Interleaved 2 of 5, Codabar
- Scan profiles — one device can serve a pipe yard and a dispatch desk, switched in one tap
- Prefix, suffix, Enter and Tab after a scan, so one scan can fill a field and move on
- Case conversion, trimming and character stripping
- Continuous scanning with duplicate suppression
- Tap to focus, pinch to zoom, torch, exposure compensation, adjustable targeting box
- Portrait and landscape, phone and tablet

PRIVACY — AND THIS IS THE PART TO CHECK

A keyboard can see everything you type. This one is built so it cannot do anything with it.

- One permission: camera. There is no internet permission at all, so the app is incapable of sending anything anywhere. Your IT department can verify that from the manifest.
- Camera frames are decoded on the device and discarded. Nothing is stored, nothing uploaded.
- It never reads the contents of the field it types into, and never reads what you type with any other keyboard.
- No predictive text, no swipe typing, no learned dictionary — those features work by storing what you type, which is exactly what this app never does.
- No advertising, no analytics, no account, no tracking.

EARLY ACCESS

The app is free while we are in early access. It will have a paid tier eventually — the DPM decoding work is expensive to build and maintain — but everyone who installs during early access keeps every feature permanently. You will not be asked to pay and nothing will stop working.

GETTING STARTED

Android requires three steps to enable any keyboard: turn it on in the keyboard list, select it as your input method, and grant camera access. The app walks you through all three.

We are here to help you, if you find any issues please contact us at [e-mail]

What’s new

speed, consistency, and a fix for zoom:
- The white stencil marks should now read consistently
- Roughly twenty times less work per preprocessing stage
- The app no longer keeps its own zoom position. It reads the camera's, so the two cannot drift.
- Zoom is now set as magnification - `2.0x` means two times - instead of a normalised position on an internal curve.