EBME Forums Forums Maintenance Technical Assistance Printing event history from Alaris PCAM

We are having trouble printing the event history using a Canon BJ200ex. The history is printing though not in a format that is user friendly. Does anyone have any suggestions?

We download to a PC via Hyperterminal or a similar Comms package, then re-format the text & print the TXT file.

Unfortunately because the PCAM outputs redundant tabs for printer layout it's necessary to manually delete them. I haven't found a setting in Hyperterminal or Odyssey that will automatically strip them.

Although it takes about 45 minutes to delete the offending tabs, I much prefer doing it this way because I am left with a computer record of the pump's log at the end of it.

I'm hoping (probably in vain) that the new V3R2 software being release for the PCAMs will tidy up its serial output.

By the way in case you don't already know the serial pinout for a PCAM is non-standard. We had to make up our own lead as follows:

PCAM pin 5 to PC pin 5.
PCAM pin 8 to PC pin 4.
PCAM pin 9 to PC pin 2.

As you can see it results in a non-reversible lead, so label each end.

All the best.

Marc

Marcel, if you send me a quick e-mail with an attached output file then i'll whip something together for you. It will be crude, basic, but it will do the job that you want.

Dear Joe

Thanks for the kind offer, but something ever so slightly embarrassing has been brought to my attention.

One of my colleagues was just doing a P5000 download following my printed instructions and did it "wrong". He opened the saved file in Wordpad and it both looked and printed perfectly.

It seems that Notepad (which is what I always use to view & edit .txt files) saves correctly, but then misinterprets the ASCII carriage returns sent out by the P5000.

Naturally I'm very pleased as well, but I always thought ASCII was a standard, so why the difference?

Marc

It probably depends on which VERSION of the "standard" you're using !