Generating and printing a random unique ID (newbie here)

[MD5150]

Can someone point me in the right direction?

At our manufacturing plant we have a vendor installing a printer on one of our machines that basically only prints a time stamp onto our product. They tell us that their device can print a unique ID if we use PCL to generate it, but they apparently don't know anything about how to set this up. I do see features in their software that appears to support PCL, but I don't know enough about PCL to know where exactly to start.

We need to generate unique ID's for each print. They must be random numbers/characters, much like a software key.

Can PCL generate such an ID? Or would I have to use another progamming language to generate the ID and then pass it, or save it, to a .pcl file and then somehow point their software to the file, or send the file to their printer?

I'm noramlly a Visual Basic programmer, so I'm sure I can write a function to generate the custom ID if needed, but I'm really not sure what to do from there.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.

Mike

 

[webrabbit]

Can you give an example of what is sent to the printer?

 

[MD5150]

I don't know, but it looks that our requirements for this project have changed and that we were able to find a printer which can automate all of this. So no worries, thanks.