I belong to a car club, and we run car shows. Participants bring their vehicles, and register them. They are then given a number, and a voting slip. They post the number on their vehicle. All participants then will vote for 5 vehicles. When the ballots are turned in, the counting begins. This is a time consuming effort.
I want to attach a bar code to each registration slip, and a duplicate bar code to the ballot. At or after registration, the registration bar code will be scanned into a database. The car number will be entered into a field. Other fields may be used for identification, but not necessary.
The ballots will be scanned, and the 5 vehicle #s will be manually entered into 5 fields. The database then can be queried for the top 10 car numbers.
I have done a lot of programming, and am familiar with PHP, but no database experience.
I suppose that my first steps will be to build a table. Assuming that I have a USB wireless scanner, how do I get the scanner to open the database to the right row, based on the bar code?