1. Home
  2. Electronics Design
  3. Interface

Interface

Centronics

B&W,

If I am reading your question right, the answer is 'no way'. The USB interface on the PC end, is a lot more than a simple IC to generate the signals, the basic 'master' code, totals over 30000 lines of code, excluding the driver for the printer itself, and the USB card involved, and uses a significant amount of processing power as well. USB is designed to use cheap 'slave' units at the peripherals like the printer, but as a 'cost' of doing this, has a lot of overhead for the master device. The simplest way to implement what you are asking for, would be a 'matchbox' industrial PC, attach a PC104 I/O card, and write a program to behave as a centronics peripheral, and take the data received, and route it to the USB port, and on to a printer attached using this interface. Using an embedded Linux, this could all be done in flash. Think in terms of possibly $300 to $400 in hardware, and a couple of weeks development time. For a single 'subset' of devices, it could possibly be done with a lot less hardware using a microcontroller, but at the cost of massively increasing the development time...

Best Wishes

Reply to
Roger Hamlett
Loading thread data ...

MAybe I'm reading it wrong or Roger is, but.. if your device is outputting to a Centronics printer and you want to use a USB printer, then I would think it's fairly easy. Your machine->CPP to serial convertor>serial to USB convertor. Both of the convertor exist about $50-100 for each. The 'trick' or hard part is to get your device to talk properly to the USB printer. Having been down this road before with 'proprietory' keyboards it can either be a 'fun' project or your worse nightmare. Providing you have full documentation on all the pieces it can and has been done. Jay

Reply to
j.b. miller

Anyone got ideas on this problem.....

I want to be able to use a USB printer on a machine that has a Centronics printer output port. The printer port on the machine is not a 25 pin parallel socket, it is a Centronics socket.

The machine provides the option to select types of printers, eg: Epson, B&W, Color, IBM etc.

If anyone knows of a readily available piece of hardware, that would be great. Otherwise a circuit or circuit ideas.

Thanks in advance,

Cheers.

!!! HAPPY & PROSPEROUS 2005 TO ALL !!!

Reply to
Dingus

It's not at all easy. A "serial to USB converter" is designed to connect to a USB HOST (i.e. a computer), not a USB DEVICE (such as the printer). There is no legal USB cable that will connect the Type A male connector on the USB-serial pod to the Type A male connector or Type B female connector on the USB printer. And if you make one yourself, it will do exactly nothing, since the printer won't be supplying the power required by the serial converter, and the serial converter doesn't contain the necessary intelligence to enumerate, much less do anything with, the printer.

Reply to
larwe

I just bought a new hpLJ1320 (two-sided printing). It has BOTH USB and Parallel capability.

In fact I'm using the parallel connection so that I can spring it off of my SMC Barricade Router, which has a parallel port, using it as a network printer.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

....

.... The 'off the shelf' laser printer I bought this year for home use has both USB and centronics connectors (Dell/Lexmark model). What is the problem with using the centronics cable?

Joop

Reply to
Joop

Try a nice shiraz from the Knappstein winery (South Australia - best wines in Australia, of course ;)). I don't know who owns it now, but it was once owned by school-friends of my mother. Cabernet is fine too, but I don't go for Merlot as much.

Reply to
larwe
[snip]

My red-of-choice right now is Cab-Merlot blend (Wolf Blass... AU).

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

Thanks to all for input of this problem. Looks like there's no easy fix. The 'machine' is a great big piece of industrial machinery and does not have a hard drive, keyboard or Windows operating system - ie everything is embedded.

I was hoping for a relatively simple low cost fix to satisfy the many customers out there with this problem. However after re-examining the problem, the solution in my mind is quite simple:

Solution....

The customers are requesting that they can use off the shelf cheap USB printers, when the machines they have purchased range from US$0.2M to US$0.5M apiece!!

Sometimes I wonder??? The difference in cost between a cheapy printer and say an industrial HP parallel printer would amount to a few hundred bucks, if that.

Even if one developed a suitable in-line interface (at great cost), then the price of the interface + USB printer would more than likely exceed the price of a decent industrial HP parallel port printer!

Why do customers always want something for nothing - just the nature of the beasts I suppose!

B&W,

Reply to
Dingus

Reply to
Dingus

I read in sci.electronics.design that Dingus wrote (in ) about 'Interface', on Fri, 31 Dec 2004:

Buy a stove! The TCO is far lower. (;-)

-- Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. The good news is that nothing is compulsory. The bad news is that everything is prohibited.

formatting link
Also see
formatting link

Reply to
John Woodgate

.... prefer a good Merlot myself........ use the wife to cook!

Reply to
Dingus

Dingus started:

Maybe this would work:

MACHINE PARALLEL OUT --> PC WITH PARALLEL PORT IN, USB TO PRINTER --> USB PRINTER

On the PC load any OS that you can code on and that has support for USB. Windows 2000 would be a good choice. (I don't rely on Windows 98/ME/XP for this, Windows 95/NT don't have USB support)

[]s 
--
Chaos Master®, posting from Canoas, Brazil - 29.55° S / 51.11° W / GMT-
2h / 15m


"Now: the 3-bit processor, with instructions:
 1. NOP - does nothing, increase PC. / 2. HLT - does nothing, doesn't 
increase PC
 3. MMX - enter Pentium(r) emulation mode; increase PC / 4. LCK - before 
MMX: NOP ; after MMX: executes F0 0F C7 C8 
 5. HCF - Halt and Catch Fire / 6. EPI - Execute Programmer
 7. DPC - Decrease PC"
Reply to
Chaos Master

I cannot agree more - Wolf Blass is currently top of my shopping list, even their whites are great!

Reply to
Dingus

Thanks for the tip :-)

Reply to
Dingus

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.