ABSTRACTDedicated Hardware for two dimensional (2D) barcodes is used in numerous applications depending on the levels of preserving data in complex format. These modules are complex in their design and also take considerable amount of time for their development, testing and verification both at software and hardware levels. On the other hand, modern android mobile/tablets are ready to use hardware platform that fulfills all the essential hardware requirements to implement the extraction of barcodes. Additionally, they got the capability to run the complex image processing algorithms on application level, which increases the prototyping speed considerably for 2D barcode implementation. In order to reduce the algorithm complexity further, different techniques have been devised on hardware level such as light conditioning and orientation, placement of barcode and distance from the camera. The system has been effectively deployed for the decoding of PDF 417 codes on student university cards at the university. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 23:596–602, 2015; View this article online atwileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI10.1002/cae.21630