Send ASCII value through Serial port using OPOS drivers

Question

I have point of sale system (catapult ECRS) and would like to send every transaction to my DVR to monitor cashier’s activity. Catapult sells their DVR system, which I don't like. I spoke to them about making connection from Catapult to my DVR, and they said the only other way you can do this by sending ASCII value through the serial port. They also told me that I need get some kind of OPOS driver that sends out every transaction through the serial port. This system only recognizes OPOS drivers. I bought the POS data capture box from AverMedia, but this box depend on what is being sent by the POS and I know POS is not sending anything, there aren’t any OPOS driver select inside the system. Can anyone help me out with this? I will owe you nice bottle of wine if you can help me out. Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi,

I haven't ever heard of the AverMedia box before, but looking at an image of the box and reading a description of it's capabilities on an auction at Ebay it appears that all it does is intercept the printer data and transmit the formatted output to the security system (as well as the raw data to the printer) so the receipt detail can be overlaid on the security video.

So if your POS is printing receipts, then it should indeed be sending data... and I don't think an OPOS driver is needed for the aver device as the printer commands should just be passed through to your existing printer, so an OPOS driver is needed for the printer but not the intermediate device.

Of course, this is all just guesses.

Have you connected the device between your printer and POS terminal, and caused the POS to print a receipt ? Does the manual for the Aver device mention any other setup required ?

I think you probably need to contact Aver or ECS... there is no Pos .Net device or driver set that seems to match up with this class of device (except for the PosPrinter device, maybe with the aver device reporting itself as a journal printer ?). As a result this is beyong the scope of this forum. Additionally, it doesn't sound like you are a programmer or have the source code for the ECRS POS, and so if your POS really isn't sending any data out of the serial port you're unlikely to be able to fix that yourself. You also don't typically use an OPOS driver (service object) directly, but rather work through a higher level interface (such as a common control object) and so I'm not sure the advise you've got from ECRS has been very helpful to this point.

Anyway, like I said, try connecting the device between the PC and printer, check the manual for any additional setup instrutions, and then get the POS to print a receipt and see if that works.