MS Access communication with label printing scales

[fadMiS]

Hi

I just created POS application using MS Access. It works fine but I have problems understanding communication and printing label creation in any label printing scale such as CAS LP-1000 thermal label printing scale. I use EAN13 fonts so I would like to know how can I create labels for products that will be printed in any label printing scale and after that scanned with barcode reader from cashier showing product name, price and quantity. Table where I store products is called Products with fileds ProductID, ProductName, Price, UnitsInStock.

I would highly appreciate any suggestions on this.

 

[DougP]

I appears that this unit only sends data out through its serial port. Is that what you want to do?

DougP, MCP, A+

 

[fadMiS]

DougP,

No, the matter is much more complicated. I need to understand process of PLU (Product Look-Up) number generation. Other problem is how PLU file can be accessed by any barcode POS application.

fadMis

 

[DougP]

Not sure what Process you are talking about, PLU lookup.
It is probably just a database of some sort. And if you can export this PLU file to ASCII then anything should be able to open it for Import or ???


DougP, MCP, A+

 

[fadMiS]

DougP,

You are surprising me since you are one of the first guys in this forum. I will be clearer. If you go in supermarket which has meat, fruits etc, you can notice that they don’t have barcodes of course. But sales guy who gives you bananas seats near machine called label printing scale which measures banana’s weight and prints label with EAN13 UPC or any other barcode. This label can be sticked in plastic bag and scanned at the cashier. You will understand this if you go to this URL:

http://www.averyberkelusa.com/docs/op_man/MX050 Bugfix.pdf

You can see an example of using PLU numbers. Actually i need more information on how PLU file which is generated can be accessed or used from any POS application (Access file for example)

fadMis

 

[hugher01]

Fadmis,
Just found this Thread, Funnily enough I have been doing some work for an Organic Farm Shop which involved building him a product database (Ms Access) and facilities to Upload/Download
the PLU's to his Scales (Avery M-Series). The PLU's contain the Barcode for scanning. The application will also print Barcodes onto standard labels for inhouse Product (weighed and non-weighed) it does this by encoding the Barcode into a Barcode Font and printing directly from Access or Word Mail/Merge. The difficult bit was reverse engineering the PLU files on the scales so that he could use the DB as his product database and Update the Scales directly from access. This turned out to be fairly straight forward. The PLU file is uploaded/download using an Avery Supplied Utility which I start and drive using VB Shell/Keystrokes so is really adapable to any System as long as there is a Windows Based utility available to upload/download the file and it is possible to extract/rebuild the data from the file once they are on the PC.