Ieee 1284 Printer Driver

[Agalia Valcin]

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I do this but when i connected the usb cable to my pc, system say Generic IEEE 1284.4 printing support Error then the drivers was install. USB printer was install but ieee not. I havent the IEEE 1284.4 cable in printer package. PC was connected to the internet.

I'm trying to print from my MacBook Air through my home network to my HP 5 Laserjet Printer and having very limited success. The printer is old (pre usb) and so I have connected it with a Prolific Technology INc. IEEE-1284 Controller, running from the parallel port on the printer to the usb port on my Belkin Router, which serves my home network.

When I go to the Belkin Network center, it shows the Prolific Technology INc. IEEE-1284 Controller, with the word "printer" after it. When I send my first print job, the MacBook will sometimes find it and sometimes not. But it will never find it a second time.

I have tried all three settings in the Belkin network center (1-always start it manually; 2-always have it on at startup; 3-shared, starting up and shutting down with each job) but none seems to work. When I've tried to set it up as shared it tells me it's looking for the printer driver but then won't let me install it (and I know it's already installed.)

Starting with Windows 2000, the operating system provides a kernel-mode USB print driver, usbprint.sys that connects the printer subsystem to the USB stack. The native USB printer driver frees vendors from the need for developing their own kernel-mode USB printer drivers. This allows vendors to develop high-level user-mode printer drivers that work with both USB and parallel printers.

The usbprint.inf installation file contains a compatible ID that matches all USB class 7 printer devices. If the USB hub driver enumerates one of these devices, the operating system will find a match for the ID that the hub driver generates in usbprint.inf and will load the USB printer driver, usbprint.sys. The compatible ID found in usbprint.inf has the following form:

As soon as it is loaded, the USB printer driver creates a new PDO for the printer device. When the Plug and Play (PnP) manager queries for the device identification strings of the newly created PDO, the USB printer driver creates a new hardware ID, derived from the device's IEEE 1284 string that is compatible with the string identifiers generated by the parallel bus enumerator. This hardware ID has the following format:

Spaces in the string are replaced with underscores. For example, if the manufacturer's name is "Hewlett-Packard," the model name is "HP Color LaserJet 550," and the checksum is 3115, the hardware ID would be as follows:

Note The CRC that is generated by the operating system may not match the CRC that is calculated as described in the preceding section, or by any other CRC algorithm. As a result of this, your printer driver may not be able to calculate the correct hardwareID to use with the INF file for the printer driver.To retrieve the hardwareID, it is better to search the setupapi.dev.log file that is associated with the USB printer that is being installed.

Hello, and thanks to you both.

The thing is, I'm talking about a modern low cost printer,

meaning a USB interface. While for the hardware, there are several

possible solutions, like the RS-232 to USB modules etc. , the problem seems to be in implementing the software interface. Unless... there's something I'm missing. Any more ideas ???

Thanks.

The software required to "drive" a printer isn't terribly difficult (this includes "modern' printers such as the latest ink-jets & laser printers). They all respond to standard printer commands, such as "form-feed" (load a page) (eject a page), carriage-return, line-feed, ets.

In addition, if you want to use the more exotic stuff like Escape-sequences you can find information on the net. I have.

Perhaps I'm not understanding where your problem is.

Hi Ron, and thanks for your answer.

Well, maybe I'm missing something (apparently).

I can summarize the problems in 2 sentences:

1. handling the USB interface.

2. Driving the printer. I don't know their "language". Do you think

(or know) with USB it's the same as with the parallel port ?

Maybe you can direct me to some material about that - I'd appreciate

it very much.

Now I think I understand; I can address at least part of your concerns.

First, I've used USB to serial converters and I think this is not what you need. They tend to convert FROM USB to Serial, not the other way round (note: I'm not an expert here, there may well be devices that do what you want).

Now on the printer driver: printers just want to see ASCII text with minimal controls. This is roughly what to do:

1. Put your text to be printed into a buffer of some size

2. You have to provide control characters to the printer. You can either integrate them into your text buffer which makes your "buffer-creator" more complex and your actual driver simpler, or you can keep your text buffer pure and have the driver provide them "on-the-fly". Either way the first thing to send to the printer is a 0x0C (form-feed/new page). Then start sending the text buffer a character at a time. If your print-out is to be 80 chars wide then you have to send a carriage-return / line-feed (cr/lf) after each block of 80 chars. This is simply 0x0D /0x0A.

3. You should keep track of how many lines you've sent. After each "n" lines of text you should send another form-feed (0x0C) to load a new page.

4. When you've finished you should send a final form-feed to kick out your last page.

I hope this helps.

Hi Ron ! Thanks again for your answer.

Well, your answer is helpfull. I didn't have any experience with

printers or USB, so I needed some directions.

About the USB - I thought those converters are bidirectional. If that's not the case, I guess it complicates the design. I'll have to look more carefully into it.

About printers - thanks for the info. I also found a whole API to HP printers (called APDK), written in C++, in HP developers site. Have you worked with this one ? I'll have to study this one also.

Best Regards,

I hope someone makes a serial/usb device that does what you want. If you find one pls let everyone know.

I have some experience at -NOT- making usb work; my current opinion of usb is that it was designed by a committe of creatures that didn't have enough brain-cells to rub together. It is simply the worst-designed communications architecture I've ever seen.

Good news on your HP driver find. Study it, extract what you need and move on down the road.

Good luck with your project.

Thanks for your answer.

If I have any new interesting findings, I'll let everyone know. Since you've got a lot of experience, Maybe we'll talk again, when I get to deal with actual bits and bytes.

Thanks, again, for your help.

The laptop doesn't have a parallel port so I purchased a USB to Parallel Adapter to enable the physical connection between the laptop & printer but the laptop still doesn't "see" the printer, however it does recognize the adapter and in Control Panel / Devices & Printers / Unspecified it "sees" it as an IEEE-1284 Controller.

Yes, I'd discovered the absence of support, which doesn't surpise me given that I bought the printer 20+ years ago. I've retained it simply because it was potentially useful for the rare occasions that I travel and have need for print capability whilst travelling. I also have retained spare cartidges as I can't imagine them still being on the market.

I "upgraded" to Win 10 when it first became available and after a month of trying to come to terms with it, got so sick of it that I upgraded back to Win 7. I've been dreading the day when I'm forced to again make the switch and yes, I know that day is fast approaching.

I have a perfectly good desk printer; the occasions that I travel and have no other access to print facilities are rare and don't really justify buying another printer, hence the purchase of the adapter cable.

The good news is that I now have it working properly. I contacted the cable manufacturer and they gave me step by step instructions to enable Win 7 to see the printer. I'm still experimenting with minor settings, like print margins, but it's only minor tweaks that remain to be set.

If you have working Epson printer drivers for Windows, linux and can print to the old Epson using the USB to parallel adapter, then perhaps it may be possible to connect it to an Openwrt router (with USB) running p910nd print server daemon, to provide ethernet access to the printer?

Another option is they use to make a wired and wireless print server with a parallel port already installed so no usb to parallel adapter required. Though I don't remember the make and model. Pick up one of these likely has only 10/100 but that is more then enough.

I have an ancient HP LaserJet 6MP that has a parallel to USB cable and it is plugged into an Airport Express which is wired to my network. This works perfectly, but a large part of this is that the printer drivers still exist and/or the printer works as a generic postscript printer. Mobile printing is not an option, though -- the printer and print-server don't support airprint or any other cloudprint protocols.

All printers, whether connected by parallel port, USB, bluetooth or network, identify themselves using an IEEE 1284 Device ID string. This is a sequence of key:value pairs with, among others, fields for the manufacturer, the model, the command sets supported by the printer.

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