Seiko Label Printer Driver Help

[dossdev]

Hello all,

I'm looking for some help with printing to Seiko thermal label printers. Specifically the "Smart Label" family of printers. These are bit mapped raster printers where every dot has to be accounted for. At this point I'd be happy with being able to print simple ASCII chars...

Thanks in advance.
Dan

[mbradley]

This queston has so many layers....I have not looked at the printer in question, but here is a quick list;

1: what physical interface? parallel port? if yes, you need to write a quick hardware driver, simple 8data bits, and a few controls signals

2: data sequences, most printers have a documented sequence of control chr's that dtermine what is printed.

3: ascii chr's, if the printer does not support them directly, then you need a chr set, there are several bitmap chr sets you can get, or even copy one of the LCD chr sets, almost all lcd manuals show you the bitmap chr's

4: a driver that ties it all together.
_________________
Michael Bradley
www.mculabs.com
Open Drivers and Projects

[dossdev]

Thanks for your reply Michael.

The hardware is is simply RS-232. There are several commands, however the majority of the work appears to be done by a 'print literal' which prints the bit-mapped image (font, etc), one line at a time.

The printer does not support printing of ASCII chars directly. As you say, each char has to be converted first.

I do have several font char sets. Just need to create the routines to convert and print each char.

[mbradley]

Just off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to print the chr's

1: a function that translates a string of chrs to bitmap, 1 line at a time. ie: top row of each chr, then second, etc...

2: have 3 functions, such as clearBitmap, writeStr, printBitmap. where you actualy build the bitmap in memory before sending it out.

do you have a link to the manual for this printer?
_________________
Michael Bradley
www.mculabs.com
Open Drivers and Projects

[dyeatman]

Depending on which model he has, here is the link for the various model user manuals:

http://office.manualsonline.com/manuals/mfg/seiko/seiko_printer_product_list.html

There appears to be no Technical manual for these printers that I can find.

Here is a site with technical info on the SLP printers:
http://www.avdcs.co.uk/tech/faq/fa_smart/fa_smart.html

The SLP Pro information seems to be the most organized and complete
including the command to print raw binary data (bitmap)
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[dossdev]

Here's a link to the latest Command Interface Spec for all Seiko Smart Label Printers (SLP):

http://www.doss.com/Docs/SLP%20Command%20Interface%20Specification%20v2_4.pdf

[mbradley]

looks pretty straight forward

the CMD_PRINT is the one of interest, send the 0x40 followed by the number of bytes in the data packet, followed by the data.

Assumed 240 pixels wide

char lineBuff[31];

void sendLine(void)
{
int8 i;
putc(0x40);
putc(30);
for (i=0; i<31; i++)
{
putc(lineBuff[i]);
}
}

I believe that should send out one complete bitmap line.
_________________
Michael Bradley
www.mculabs.com
Open Drivers and Projects