Printing Solutions

Safety in public buildings

Emergency lighting systems are mandatorily installed in all large public building facilities such as airports, hotels, clubs, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, colleges, licensed premises, offices, museums, shops, multi-storey dwellings etc. They are designed to activate automatically in emergency situations (e.g. fires, power cuts, etc.) to provide sufficient light for people to safely evacuate during power supply failures.

Standard logging norms

Each country has different norms for various kinds, types and sizes of public buildings to guarantee minimum safety standards. These usually enjoin continuous monitoring and regular automatic testing of luminaires (exit signs) and battery loads. In compliance with current standards companies are also usually compelled to log and print out test results and alarms with log printers for permanent record keeping.

High price for renewal ..?

Despite the prospective costs involved, companies operating emergency lighting systems in public building facilities are responding to the current changes to electronic systems. Depending on the solution chosen, however, the costs for the adaptation of legacy to USB interfaces may range from total replacement of lighting control systems to merely upgrading existing ones with customized supplementary components. At first glance, the potential costs involved appear overwhelming!

.. not if you do your homework!

The major German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG, for example, wanted to raise the log printing standards of its barely 10-year old CEAG emergency lighting systems and for some reason or other could not be helped by its customary supplier and operating company. So it came that Bayer, too, may have been startled at first by the dire prospects of having to entirely replace its functioning unamortized lighting systems under enormous costs. Fortunately, however, Bayer's operators did their homework! After a short search in the net they alighted upon the amazingly cost-saving ipcas supplementary component solutions

• Centronics to USB Printer Converter for parallel interfaces
• RS232 to USB Converter for serial interfaces

Get more than an upgrade

The ipcas supplementary component solutions are not only the answer to changing interface technology. – For the price of a simple upgrade you additionally gain access to the future technology of online monitoring, printing, testing, data processing, control … and more … via various kinds of networks ….

For additional benefits and information, refer to previous contributions and the specifications under Printing Solutions on the ipcas hardware website.

So there is good news with excellent prospects for all companies and businesses faced with similar requirements to upgrade or even network their log printing for both parallel and serial systems.

ipcas Centronics to USB Printing Converters are currently also being used by companies in modern printing solutions for ultrasonic welding machines.

Manufacturers using ultrasonic welding machines (e.g. for plastic bag sealing in the packaging industries) often take recourse to the continuous systematic logging of MDA (machine data acquisition) data to ascertain optimized threshold values in research and development. Reliable logging is also required to compile machine parameter reports as proof of quality for customers (TQM, claim management).

Approx. 20,000 lines on paper (up to 1,000 Din A4 standard pages) often used to be printed to log 8-10 parameters (e.g. temperature, pressure, etc.) for a single procedure. Yet this log data is now recorded electronically and stored on USB Stick and eventually on a PC/sever in the companies just mentioned.

In times of replacing legacy log printers with USB printers and adopting online solutions, companies are finding the ipcas printing solution with the Centronics to USB Printing Converter increasingly attractive for many reasons:

• Optimized paper consumption (= zero for online version)
• Greater logging reliability (no data loss)
• Wide printer selection (long list, few restrictions)
• No refitting required (ready to run)
• Easy to configure (ready presetting included on USB Stick)

The Centronics to USB Printing Converters also leaves customers with a wide range of options, for example to use a USB printer, network printer, USB Stick, Ethernet (see figure above).

For specifics, go to Centronics to USB Printing Converters webpage.

For machines/devices with serial interfaces, view RS 232 to USB Converters.

Legacy to USB interfaces …

A little more than a decade ago, log printers connnected to injection molding machines for log printing used to have serial or parallel interfaces. Now that retailers are running out of spare parts for serial/parallel log printers due to the decline of serial interfaces, the changeover to USB printers has become a salient issue for investment.

… for modern log printing applications …

The ARBURG "Allrounder" (injection molding machine) is a typical example how the ipcas

is being applied to link up machines with old interfaces to operate with modern printing technology using the customary USB printers for log printing. The control unit of the "Allrounder" is simply connected with a serial (RS232) cable to the serial port of the RS232 to USB printer converter.

… easy to start

Due to the implementation of software specially designed for the ARBURG "Allrounder", the printer converter does not have to be configured. The RS232 to USB Printer Converter is immediately ready to run when connected. Besides, the converter can be used both for old and new control units.

For more specifics, view RS232 to USB Printer Converter webpage.

For machines with parallel interfaces, view Centronics to USB Converter webpage.

Also view coverage in LinuxDevices.com.

A couple of weeks ago I introduced the ipcas RS232-to-USB Converter and the Centronics-to-USB Converter as gap-filling solutions to link up legacy port equipment with modern USB and network technology. Both legacy port servers are based on ipcas's Linux Box LB1 hardware design.

This is just to tell you we got some excellent coverage in LinuxDevices.com