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Help! Serial Printer Data display/emulation
Hello all,
I am looking for a little help. I am involved with emergency services in my county, and the county uses Old Okidata ML320 serial printers to send Dispatch Reports to the fire/EMS stations. Basically what is happening is that there is a 9600 baud modem in each station that is dialed into when there is a call. This modems serial port is plugged directly into the serial port on the back of the Okidata printer. So for simplicity (Telephone line -- 9600 baud modem -- Serial Okidata Printer) The printer prints out the data. The goal is to remove this old Okidata printer, run the modem into the serial port on PC then monitor the data on the PC, and print the data on out choice of a printer. I am looking at the program called Comcap. This would monitor the serial data, display it, and redirect to a printer. I fear that this is not that simple however. What type of data is in the serial stream coming out of the modem and being fed directly into the Okidata printer? Is it ASCII, Plaintext, or something else? I have also seen the program called PrintCapture. I am curious if this might be the solution that I am looking for. I have not seen any talk of it decoding data that comes out of modems though, and not knowing what kind of data goes into a serial print, I am stuck with making my next move. Many thanks in advance for the help, Steve |
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Help! Serial Printer Data display/emulation
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:28:43 -0700, Steve Castellano wrote:
simple however. What type of data is in the serial stream coming out of the modem and being fed directly into the Okidata printer? Is it ASCII, Plaintext, or something else? An educated guess -- don't bet the farm on this... Most likely straight ASCII, the same characters that appear on the printer, with line feeds and C/R's, maybe tabs. Conceivably some embedded escape codes that are specific to the printer, but I'd bet not. Google to see if you can find a manual for the printer model to read what it accepts. |
#3
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Help! Serial Printer Data display/emulation
On 3/18/2011 12:08 PM, default wrote:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011 08:28:43 -0700, Steve Castellano wrote: simple however. What type of data is in the serial stream coming out of the modem and being fed directly into the Okidata printer? Is it ASCII, Plaintext, or something else? An educated guess -- don't bet the farm on this... Most likely straight ASCII, the same characters that appear on the printer, with line feeds and C/R's, maybe tabs. Conceivably some embedded escape codes that are specific to the printer, but I'd bet not. Google to see if you can find a manual for the printer model to read what it accepts. There might be switches on the printer that specify what sort of text it expects, ASCII, OKIdata specific, Epson something or other ,etc. You probably have a terminal emulation on your computer already - Hyperterminal was often included in the Windows software. Connect the modem to your PC, run Hyperterminal, and look at the data on screen. |
#4
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Help! Serial Printer Data display/emulation
Thanks,
I will hook it up and see what happens. Im hoping it is just ASCII data. If it is I will need to figure out some way of getting the raw data to emulate into something that prints onscreen properly. One step at a time I guess... Thanks for the quick replies. |
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