How to make a Sunmi Blink typing spaces

I recently purchased a Sunmi Blink 2D barcode scanner, for more stylish booking code registration with Muckturnier.org ;-)

Indeed, this thingy looks way cooler than a “normal” handheld barcode scanner. I think it’s intended to be used in retail as a POS termial for QR code based payments (like Alipay). However, here in Germany (or Europe?!) this way to pay isn’t too common (we use NFC for that). Thus, the choice for such scanners is not too manifold. However, for a muckturnier, this thing should be the very right device for QR booking code scanning.

The scanner has a configuration manual with special barcodes to e.g. set the keyboard layout, which codes to search for and so on – just like a “normal” barcode scanner (after all, it is one). However, whilst testing it out, I noticed one problem: The scanner did not type encoded spaces. All space characters were simply skipped and omitted.

E.g. the following QR code contains QR Code with a bunch of spaces:

Yet, the Sunmi Blink would type QRCodewithabunchofspaces when scanning it. I also tried Data Matrix, Aztec and PDF 417 – always with the same result: Spaces encoded in the barcode would be ignored when scanning them.

So I decided to file a request at Sunmi’s customer support asking what’s going on here – and I actually got an answer. After writing a few emails and describing the problem, sending some example barcodes and so on the employee finally asked me to try out the following configuration code:

… and it actually did the trick! After having scanned it, the Sunmi Blink typed spaces encoded in a barcode as-is.

This code is actually not printed in the configuration manual. So you have no chance to find it. The Chinese ideographs below are translated to “Output Function Keys” by Google Translator. I would suppose that there’s also a reverse code to turn the spaces typing off again that should read 3030AD1 (like e.g. the two barcodes turning Aztec Code support on and off, which encode 1003281 and 1003280 respectively).

Anyway this seems to be some non-standard barcode format. I can read it using my phone’s barcode scanner Binary Eye and it does decode to 3030AD0, identified as a Code 128 barcode. But when I create a Code 128 barcode containing 3030AD0, the result looks different. Most probably, there’s some special sequence that ensures that the scanner’s configuration is not changed if a real/normal Code 128 barcode containing some configuration sequence is scanned. I thus could not test if one can switch this off again other than resetting the scanner to factory defaults.

However, I hope this helps somebody at some point, as my searches for “Sunmi Blink doesn’t enter spaces” or such didn’t yield any result, and this code seems to be not (yet?) documented officially, at least not for the Sunmi Blink. But after all, my Sunmi Blink now types spaces :-)