I’m looking to connect up to 8 barcode scanners to one arduino but cannot figure out if I can set the address on the bardcode scanner or, if all are connected over USB how I would talk to each scanner breakout board individually to prompt one module at a time to read a barcode and report that back to an Arduino. Can I connect all the barcode readeres together over USB and then prompt each indivudally with a GPIO? Thanks!
Most USB hosts allow multiple devices with the same VID/PID and would assign different com port numbers, though in my experience it isn’t obvious how they would map com port number to device, and may re-map at will.
In this case, since you want to connect to an Arduino, I would use the 3.3v logic TTL serial port instead. Either use a processor that has enough serial ports or use a mux that would allow you to have one processor port talking to multiple scanners, one at a time.