Sending control codes to a printer

[Gene FitzPatrick]

Has anyone had success in sending control codes to a USB printer either directly through XBASIC
or perhaps through an XBASIC driven command window action?

Specifically, I need to send the following string of hex codes to an Epson receipt printer:

1B 70 00 32 F9

This will cause the printer to send the signal to open a cash drawer.

Thank you.

Gene
[email protected]

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Do an Advanced Search on this message board. Search term "cash drawer" (with the quotes)


Asked and answered fairly often.

[Gene FitzPatrick]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Thank you very much Stan.

Gene

[Gene FitzPatrick]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Looking at all the chatter regarding opening cash drawers seems to indicate that the real issue/need is not understood. The real need has to do with not having to open the drawer with every printing as can certainly be done by setting the printer parameters but rather being able to trigger an opening as needed. The receipt is not the only thing that a user would like to print. Opening the drawer with all other kinds of "reports" is unnecessary.

Perhaps this can be tackled in smaller steps?

How would one send a carriage return to the receipt printer via a USB connection from xBasic? Once sending a CHR$(13) down the line is accomplished perhaps we can expand upon that to send a hex code string?

Anyone?

Gene FitzPatrick

[DaveM]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

my okidata is on NE004 if I am noit mistaken - if it helps you

Alpha 4 could do this easily. it had most of the codes included for popular printers at the time. It is one of the features that never came over that I saw.

[GGandhi]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

How would one send a carriage return to the receipt printer via a USB connection from xBasic? Once sending a CHR$(13) down the line is accomplished perhaps we can expand upon that to send a hex code string?

while i have not tried this yet ( hoping to play with this concept this weekend)
if you are able to write a short program in a language you are familiar and compile that one, and if that one sends the CHR$(13) successfully via the usb connection to the printer then you could call that short program
sys_shell("c:your_program_directory\your_program_name") and alpha will execute that program.
if you succeed then rest will be history.

remember i have not done this yet.

[Gene FitzPatrick]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Thank you Gandhi

This seems to be a strong enough need for the A5 crew to consider adding don't you think?

Good luck this weekend and please let us all know how it goes for you.

Gene

[Gene FitzPatrick]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Thanks Dave.

My vote is in to request the Alpha crew add the ability to send control codes to printers via USB!

How about you?

Gene

[DaveM]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Somewhere in the code archive or a thread here is a downloadable exe written by Jim Chapman that will send printer codes, but only to lpt and com ports.

In php, these were taken care of around 2004 +- with some serious code where you could actually find and use the printer name.

I have not run across the code in java script(haven't looked for it).

I believe the code is there in powerbasic, where somebody wrote it and donated. That would be a dos app(I think), but could be called from alpha.( they have windows and dos tools there).

[jacobe]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

This is not perfect, but it does work for me. It might not work for a softprinter (ie. printer with no built in intelligence that relies on the host to do all of its processing).


To print directly to a USB (or any) printer first share the printer.

Then create a new file to the UNC path of the printer.

Finally, write to the file like you normally would any other file.

An example:
\\jacob-pc is the host computer
p is the printer share
the UNC path is \\jacob-pc\p

dim file_pointer as P
dim text as C

file_pointer = file.create("\\jacob-pc\p", FILE_RW_SHARED)

text="this is a test" + chr(13) + chr(10) + "hi ho" + chr(8) + "e" + chr(11)

file_pointer.write(text)

file_pointer.close()

There are some control codes to test if it is working, if it is working you should see:

This is a test
hi he

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Nice Jacob.

For my HP this outputs your text and ejects the page.

dim file_pointer as P
dim text as C
file_pointer = file.create("\\ACNIELSEN\HPLaserJ", FILE_RW_SHARED)
text="this is a test" + chr(13) + chr(10) + "hi ho" + chr(8) + "e" + chr(11)
file_pointer.write(text)
text=chr(027)+chr(038)+chr(108)+chr(048)+chr(072)+ chr(40)+chr(104)+chr(41)
file_pointer.write(text)
file_pointer.flush()
file_pointer.close()

[MikeData]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

This did work for me.

sys_shell("c:\sendstr.exe 2 27 112 00 100 250",2)
sys_shell("c:\sendstr.exe 1 27 112 00 100 250",2)

[Gene FitzPatrick]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

The code you refer to is Jim Chapman's sendstr.exe. Like you said that does not work with USB printers.

[Gene FitzPatrick]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

This works well Jacob. Thank you.

Do you know the format to allow the sending of HEX codes to the printer?

Thanks,

Gene

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Sending control codes to a printer

Probably

text= chr(hex_to_dec("1B"))+chr(hex_to_dec("70"))+chr(hex_to_dec("00"))+chr(hex_to_dec("32"))+chr(hex_to_dec("F9"))