bouncing an idea...

I'm a grad student with a university medical research lab, and they have thousands of samples coming through. They want to integrate a web-based tracking system using barcodes and scanners to trace the samples through the different processing points in the lab. And they don't want to pay for a commercial system - they want something "homegrown" to be cooked up. I "think" I can handle this, but I haven't found any info about sending data into a php/mysql system from a scanner. I've come across some scanners which handle DDE (dynamic data exchange - sends data directly to a windows program) Does anybody out there do anything like this using php and mysql? If so, please send some suggestions my way. Thanks!!! -Kirk