[luau] The open-sourcing of PriceBusters

R. Scott Belford sctinc at flex.com
Fri May 24 16:20:01 PDT 2002


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Strode" <halfline at hawaii.rr.com>
To: <luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 7:45 PM
Subject: Re: [luau] The open-sourcing of PriceBusters


> Hi Scott.
> I was kind of confused by what Warren was saying and so I relooked over
> the specification and found this paragraph that suddenly confused me:
>
> > On the server end, peripheral devices can be defined.  That pole
> > display showing the gum, let's say it was a serial port pole.  On the
> > server end, a remote printer is defined where the pole is located.
> Why?

Most of our poles and receipt printers are handled through the telnet
session and this MC/PC escape sequence.  Thing is, some, not all, of my
poles are not pass-through parallel port poles, so they don't work with this
"local" file.  They are serial poles and the telnet software we use now
won't let us pass jobs off to the serial port. So, on the server we define
this remote printer which is actually a windows pole display.  In the POS
software there are configuration settings for each inidividual register.
For the registers with the serial port pole I tell Counterpoint not to pass
pole print jobs through the local parallel port, I tell it to print pole
display jobs to the defined queue.
>
> > In our case, because our register pc's run windows, that pole display
> > is known to windows as a generic text serial printer.  It is shared.
> So anytime a code is read from the bar code reader, it sends a sequence
> from console input accross the telnet session to the server.  The server
> then sends out the price back through the telnet session and it goes to
> the cashier's display, and then with the MC/PC escape sequences it goes
> to the pole display and the receipt printer (because they are hooked up
> in the same parallel port and they are programmed to both know which
> parts of the data stream are relevant for them).  So my question is,
> when is this smb printer share getting used?  Everything seems to happen
> through the telnet session and terminal emulator.

In most cases this is exactly right.  The dealer that I took Pricebuster's
over from made LOTS of mistakes.  One was selling her a bunch of serial port
poles that she could not use.  At some point last year I figured out that
they could be salvaged as samba printers.  What you observe is true-samba
printers are not needed.  In all of my future stores I will aquire the right
poles.  However, I do have some samba poles requiring this band-aid
approach.  Good observations, Ray.
>
> > We setup this remote windows printer on the server, usually name the
> > queue with that register's number, and when the application gets your
> > gum data stream, it knows to print the price data to the user defined
> > printer.
> Wait.  If it's printing to the user-defined printer, then why are the
> MC/PC escape sequences being used at all?

hopefully above answers this.
>
> > In this case it is a remotely shared windows printer.  It can easily
> > be any printer.
> This might be a good opportunity to experiment with cups' implementation
> of Internet Printing Protocol.


scott





More information about the LUAU mailing list