SpiceWare's Blog - Vanity, take three

RSS Bot · April 9, 2006

Was all set for a productive Medieval Mayhem weekend when I ending up working until 9 last night and another 6 hours today We have a "label station" at work that's hooked up to 6 Zebra printers to generate labels. Each printer is loaded with a different size label and the software I wrote accepts a work order # and prints out all the labels required to build the finished product. The computer started to "not see" the printers, but was inconsistent as to which printer it couldn't see. Tried all sorts of things and when I left work last night 4 printers were working. This morning only 2 would work. Finally decided to swap the PC out and while adding the printers to the new system I noticed an electrical smell that I hadn't noticed before. In order to hook up 6 printers to one system we used parallel to USB adapters. Turns out one of the USB to Parallel adapters had started to go bad and was causing the computer to intermittently not see the other printers over the USB bus. The flaky adapter finally gave up the ghost when I plugged it into the new system - it even became too hot to hold. I didn't have another adapter handy but I managed to scrape up an old parallel cable and used the LPT port instead.

That said - my idea for using the playfield didn't quite pan out as there isn't enough free time in the middle to handle both sides of the PF - why oh why couldn't they have just used 5 registers instead of 2 1/2.

However, not all was lost. By combining the playfield with the ball to fill in the gaps, I was able to get what I wanted without having to resort to "illegal" WSYNCs

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