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socket printers... pco ?

Former Member
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I need to print some labels using a kind of printer that works with sockets, the printer has an "IP" and "PORT" and I have to send the content to be printed and receive the answer.

has anybody already done something like this ? do I have to use PCo, isn´t ?

is there another forum to talk about PCo ?

Accepted Solutions (0)

Answers (4)

Answers (4)

Joery
Explorer
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I have solved my issues concerning contacting an external device by using a custom action that creates the socket sends data to the device and receives answers from it. it wasn't too hard to do once i figured out (with some help of the community) how to create a custom action.

So i would advice you to create a custom action as well for communicating with the printer. It seems the logical solution until PCo supports this.

Joery
Explorer
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I have the same issue. The difference is I need to connect to a weighing scale.
I need to setup the connection to it and then push a command to recieve data as a response (most of the time the current weight).

I would advice to write a custom action block for this. Working with sockets in Java ain't so hard to do. The tricky part seems to be deploying the action by using the generated jar file (didn't succeed in this part myself yet).

What I want my action block to do works perfectly in plain Java though.

former_member196557
Active Contributor
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HI Michel,

What model of printer are you referring to?  

What are the label contents and data formats?

Are you using MII or SAP ME in your environment as well?

PCo does not directly support this kind of Socket interface at present.

Regards, Steve

Former Member
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Hi Steve, I don´t have the model but its name is VideoJet, this printer prints the labels directly in the boxes. The printer has the label layouts within its memory, so we have to send just the key pairs with properties and values to be printed.  The communication works with sockets in a bi-directional way, do you know which is the better way to solve this  ?   I wouldn´t like to develop a custom action with java in MII. This printer will be called through of ECC and/or MII.

former_member196557
Active Contributor
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Mi Michel,

I cannot access any of the VideoJet manuals through their web site without registration so I cannot get the details of the communications interface. 

If this interface is truly bi-directional, where the data packets are sent to the printer and it sends a response back that needs to be handled I think you will need a custom solution.  We have don bi-directional Socket communications from a 3rd party product KepServerEX.  this is an OPC Server that PCo (and MII throuhg PCo) can communication with, and it has a UCON (User CONfiguratble) driver that can send and receive data streams over a socket connection.  It may be possible to utilize this product to drive the printer communicatons, but without access to the communications protocol I cannot say for sure.

Regards, Steve

Former Member
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thank you Steve.

so the PCo socket is just to receive data ?

Former Member
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