Hey Charles.

On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 09:06:58AM -0800, Charles Stevenson wrote:
..
> Join the club... I am also new and unemployed. ;) I once did some
> contract work for a coffee shop in colorado that was running some cheesy
> VB app called Coffee Shop Manager or something like that. The idea was

:)  I am familiar with Coffee Shop Manager.  It's expensive, cheesy,
feature bloated, written in VB and closed source.  nasty stuff.  heh.
but it offers enough "off-the-self" functionality that we spent some
time evaluating it, and I'm copying some of its interface design.
(maybe I should be ashamed of myself.)


> to keep a synchronized (sort of) database between stores so that
> customers could purchase drinks and such on a little magnetic stripe
> card.

yes, the pre-paid/"affinity" cards.  We're planning on doing that.  I'm
playing with the idea of letting our customer use any kind of card that
has a magnetic stripe as their "ID" card so that they can cut down on
the number of membership cards they have to carry around.  or...  I
guess I could just do the telephone number thing.


> I also worked for Shuffle Master on some embedded type work with
> various touch screen drivers. Before Shuffle Master bought the company
> they had been looking into POS market. I've got driver experience with
> Seiko and Ithaca printers like you'd find in a slot machine and some
> cash registers. Could be fun...

Sounds like you have some good experience.  I'm looking into buying
touch screens these days.  maybe I'll ask you for advice.

I bought a Star TSP600 receipt printer a little while ago.  They provide
a CUPS driver (a postscript raster graphics CUPS plugin... I think) and
generally the printer works great.  I'm making nice looking receipts.  I
don't understand why it's as slow as it is though.

I generate my postscript with the PostScript::Simple perl module and
send it to the printer with lpr.  This part of the process seems to work
very quickly.  A 5+ second (haven't timed it) delay follows; then the
printer starts up and prints the receipt in under a second.  The delay
between lpr returning and actual start of the print job may be
unacceptably long.  it seems like it shouldn't take that long to render
the postscript, but I don't know what else it could be.

- Ben


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