When you're integrating a Honeywell barcode scanner with a legacy POS, an industrial controller, or any host that expects ASCII-framed input, you'll often need every scanned value to arrive wrapped as STX-data-ETX. Honeywell scanners support this natively — you just need to scan a short sequence of programming barcodes from the device's User's Guide to enable the control-character mode and add the prefix and suffix.
Before you start
- Find the User's Guide for your scanner model (Voyager, Xenon, Granit, Hyperion). Honeywell ships a free PDF for every model with the full programming menu inside.
- Confirm the host application actually expects STX/ETX. Most modern Windows POS apps don't — adding control characters where they're not expected will look like extra unwanted characters at the start and end of every scan.
Step 1 — Enable Windows-mode control characters
By default, a Honeywell scanner in Windows keyboard-emulation mode silently drops ASCII control characters (anything below 0x20). Switch it into a mode that sends the literal Ctrl+X sequence so STX and ETX make it through to the host.
- Scan the Windows Mode Control + X Mode On barcode (programming-menu code KBDCAS2).
Step 2 — Add STX as a prefix
- Scan Add Prefix (programming-menu code PREBK2).
- Scan 9 twice. The first 9 selects 'all barcode types' so the prefix applies to every symbology.
- Scan 0, then 2. That's hex 02, which is the ASCII code for STX (start of text).
- Scan Save (programming-menu code MNUSAV) to commit the prefix to non-volatile memory.
Step 3 — Add ETX as a suffix (optional)
If your host wants the data wrapped on both ends, repeat the same idea on the suffix side. Skip this step if you only need a leading STX.
- Scan Add Suffix (programming-menu code SUFBK2).
- Scan 9 twice (apply to all barcode types), then 0 then 3 (hex 03 = ETX).
- Scan Save.
Verify it worked
Open Notepad on the host PC and scan a known barcode. If you see two extra characters wrapping the data (STX shows as a small box or square in most fonts; ETX likewise), the configuration is in place.
If that didn't work
- If the host shows literal text like `^B` and `^C` instead of control characters, the scanner is still in plain Windows-keyboard mode. Re-scan the Windows Mode Control + X Mode On barcode and try again.
- If you only see the data with no prefix or suffix at all, you likely missed the Save step — Honeywell scanners discard configuration changes that aren't committed.
- To clear a prefix or suffix and start over, scan Clear All Prefixes (PRECA2) or Clear All Suffixes (SUFCA2) from the User's Guide, followed by Save.
When to raise a ticket
If the scanner doesn't respond to programming barcodes at all — no beep, no acknowledgement — it may be locked by an enterprise configuration or a previous deployment script. Raise a ticket at /support/ticket with the scanner model and serial number and we'll send you a factory-reset barcode and walk you through reprogramming.