ASCII commands to printer

Ignition
1

I am looking for ways to send and receive ascii commands to some ink jet printers over Ethernet. Is this possible with ignition.

2

With the module SDK it is possible. You can create your own device driver to do this.

3

I’ve done a couple of projects where I send data to printers and RFID devices over ethernet, and I just use python sockets. Very simple, and very reliable.

Here’s a simple code snippet that uses UDP, but could be modified for TCP:

if event.propertyName == 'Send':
	import socket
	import struct

	# Define the data somehow
	data = 'This is a test'

	# Define the IP Address and Port
	IPAddress = '192.168.10.100'
	Port = 16000

	# Create Socket
	fd=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_DGRAM)

	# Create Format; refer to python STRUCT docs to get the various data type format characters.
	# The format can easily be created dynamically, and this format string handles 14 characters
	fm = '=14c'

	# Build Message
	message =struct.pack(fm,data)
	fd.sendto(message,(IPAddress,Port))
4

Thanks for the idea’s. I’m pretty much a newby at python but I’ll play around with this tonight. Travis what does it take to get the sdk module and how hard is it to set up.

5

The Module SDK is free to download. You can get it from the downloads page http://www.inductiveautomation.com/downloads/ignition. There is sample code and instructions on how to get started with the Module SDK in the zip file.

6

Thanks!!