Bespoke Development Services

We know that printers can be key to ensuring confidence in a controls system and as part of this, we have been involved in the following projects which required additional custom changes to the operation of the Retro-Printer or its software:

Capture of Output from a Siemens S5 PLC (CP-523 Interface)

Client – a major industrial who needed to replace an existing Siemens PT-88 printer.  The printer provides error, diagnostic and status messages from a Siemens S5 PLC which controls cleaning equipment.  The Retro-Printer needed to communicate with the PLC via the serial output from a Siemens CP-523 Serial I/O Module.

The first step of this project was to create a new serial to centronics adaptor which would enable the CP-523 module to communicate with the Retro-Printer.  Siemens themselves were unable to provide details of the control codes used by this once popular industrial printer. Once we had captured data, we determined the exact PT-88 printer control codes used for this specific project and created a custom printer conversion routine to process the captured data.

One issue highlighted here, was that print jobs could take anywhere between 5 minutes and several hours, meaning that the standard timeout approach for detecting the end of a print job would not work.

We examined the S5 PLC code to extract a list of all potential text strings which might be sent to the printer, and worked closely with the client to determine which strings could be used to trigger the end of a print job; ensuring that this list of strings could be adapted by the customer for other projects in the future.

Capture of Data Printed from a Kiosk to a Serial Printer

Client – a distributor of ticket kiosks where the chosen ticket is printed automatically using a thermal serial printer.  They needed to capture the ticket sales electronically in order to store it in a database.

This built upon our previous experience of capturing Kiosk data being sent to a connected USB printer (using the Interceptor Module), whereby data was captured electronically and the customer and an additional promotional page inserted into the print queue.

We knew from experience that the key issue here is the need for minimal impact on the speed at which the ticket is printed.

For this particular application, the printer connected via a standard serial port.  We worked closely with the company to provide an option utilising the Retro-Printer software to work directly from a serial port and to convert the captured data to plain text, whilst still sending the original output to printer.