Megger Pat 4D/3 Barcode printer

[Phil Maddison]

Hi everyone

I have a megger pat tester and want to print barcodes but the printer for the above is both rare and expensive.

I have tried a couple of thermal printers one is a serial by epson TM-T88111 and does print but just prints a block of question Mark's ?

The would seem to be caused by hexadecimal characters not ascii being sent any advice on how to solve this issue would be greatly appreciated

thanks

 

[SparkyChick]

If it's a custom Megger printer specifically for that purpose, the interface could be anything.

I might be inclined to get the serial output connected up to a PC and analyse what you're getting out of the tester. If you can suss that out, then my next step might be to build myself a little interface board based around say a PIC microcontroller that sits between the tester and the printer. You could probably do that quite easily and cheaply with off the shelf parts.

Are there any settings for the printer within the tester itself?

 

[Moley]

Which model of Megger is it? Do you just want to print asset ID barcodes? If so then a cheap or free barcode software on the PC could do that. If not can you print direct to the PC and then all you'll need is to knock up a simple translation prog to output in the correct format for your printer.

 

[Phil Maddison]

Hi all

I have spoken to megger today and they have told me it is a specialist bit of kit made by megger themselves and can only be used by that tester. I know my tester works ok got an old printer at work but you cannot get the labels very easily now.

I have seen in the USA a lpt2usb but it is over 100 pounds and of course not guaranteed to work !!

If megger are correct and their dedicated chip set is right then well they would say that !

My tech knowledge on the electronics is nil so building g stuff is not an option

Thanks for all your replies

 

[SparkyChick]

Any chance of a pic of the port the printer plugs in to?

It's highly unlikely they'd go to the trouble of building a printer and control board from scratch as they are available readily from specialist manufacturers. But, it could be they have hard coded the printer control codes for a specific printer into the firmware of the tester, this can be overcome with a little bit of engineering.

The fact the Epson printed ? could just mean it's not able to translate the data, possibly as a result of different baud rates, bits per character, start/stop bits etc. There are a host of parameters for serial communications and if one is off the whole thing goes to pot.