E-mailed Question: Label Printer To Interface Slc

[Chris Elston 78]

From Chris via e-mail: comments: I am triing to find some sort of label printer to interface with a SLC 5/04 to print out lot #'s. We want the SLC to produce the lot #'s after every batch. Is this possible, dose anyone have any sugestions on how to do this or if thier is a good printer to easily interface with a SLC?

[monkey 0]

Chris, I assume your PLC already has the lot # info or generates it. You can use the ACN (ascii string concatenate) to assemle a lot # from pre-defined strings and possibly an incremented integer. Then use the AWT or AWA instructions to write the info to the serial port. Of course you will have to include formatting characters CR,LF,FF etc. depending on the protocol that the printer needs. There are serial printers available, although I really can't recomend one. Also it is possible to create a "printer only" object in panelbuilder which can send information to a serial printer port attached to the panelview (depending on your panelview model) Good Luck, Monkey

[Guest panic mode]

We usually use Zebra printers (TH147 for example) but any printer with serial port would do. Normally all you have to do is setup RS232 ports and send ASCII sctrings. If you have panelview attached to the PLC you can connect printer to the RS232 port of the panelview. in order to print in such configuration, you have to create "priter object" in the PanelBuilder and then use PLC (or button on the screen) to trigger it.

[Guest Guest]

I have done printing on an existing system using a OKI Data dot matrix printer with tractor feed. I printed out of the PV 550 using the print only object. I printed a list of text (roll number, date, Flaw footage...) to labels. This worked fine but you have to make sure you get to the top of the next lable properly otherwise your spacing gets screwed up. This can get little funky. I did no try using ASCII in SCL because I was printing the same text over and over and changing only numerical values and it seemed less complicated to do it with the PV print only objects. I do not Knoow if I took the easiest route.