FPrint52K visible as Serial<->USB doesn't allow to print documents from Word, Notpad etc.

[Костя Зайцев]

I'm from Russia. Receipt printers are fiscalized here, which means they have a special protected board which prevents Office programs (such as Word) from printing to them. They are only visible in Devices&Printers as Serial<->USB under "undefined". In device manager they are only visible as COM8. Russian POS Software providers aren't interested in providing us an opportunity to print anything other than receipts(don't even want simple graphics on receipts:( From reading the blog I've got the idea that it is possible to get any printer go free range:)

How would I go about printing on such an "invisible" printer? 

The printer is FPrint55K from Atol.ru (made on the basis of AURA5200 from Posiflex). According to Posiflex the controller boards are changed in Russia when devices are fiscalized.

[James Adam]

If you can talk to the printer via Serial commands (which might be possible via the ‘COM8’ port interface), *and* if the printers still respond to bitmap commands, then you might be able to use them with our software.

Google’s translation of http://atol.ru/products/kkt/fprint/fprint-55k.html seems to say that the printer has “increased memory for graphics”, which implies that it’s at least possible to send bitmap data to the printer, but I cannot find a manual that would outline the specific commands required.

In terms of what you’d need to find and do to make a printer of this model work:

* Find a manual which outlines the bitmap commands the printer will accept

* Write a software class which accepts an array of black/white pixels and outputs the serial command data to initialise the printer and then command it to print (see https://github.com/exciting-io/printer/blob/master/lib/printer/print_processor/a2_raw.rb along with the ‘a2_printer’ library for an example)

* Write some software which runs on your Windows computer to poll a server which includes that software, and pipe any returned data to the serial interface that the printer is connected to.

Hopefully that makes sense, but it’s clearly quite a technical challenge. If you need further help I can try, but it’ll be quite limited without having access to an actual printer, along with the documentation required.

Good luck!

- James

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Printer" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to gfr-printer...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to gfr-p...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/gfr-printer.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Костя Зайцев]

Thanks so much! Indeed this proved to be more of a technical challenge than I had expected)

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Printer" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/gfr-printer/n3dgizjVnMk/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to gfr-printer...@googlegroups.com.