Paperless security printer

[FrankNRM]

I have a Win98 PC which is our security system interface. It has a dot-matrix parallel printer attached. All day long it prints lines for every door that opens, every keyswipe, all sorts of junk. Uses up massive amounts of paper. From time to time wo do need to refer to the printout to follow a chain of events, but mostly it ends up in the recycle bin after a period of time.

I would like to capture the LPT port and log to a file rather than paper. I know how to capture the LPT port to file, but this method is unreliable and there's no way to truncate the log file after it reaches some length or age.

The control software cannot be modified and expects LPT1 to work (alarms go off if LPT 1 stops responding).

Two possible solutions occur to me:
- Hardware device plugs into LPT port, has ethernet jack on other end. Makes a log file on the network somewhere.
- Software print capture with log file truncate ability. Difficult because the security PC is not connected to the LAN, and the control software prohibits access to the desktop/Windows Explorer - you can't reach the log file. The machine *could* log into the domain to place the log somewhere, but that connection is a security risk.

Any ideas?

-frank

 

[eyec]

check out Karen's Power Tools website
she has a small programs that track prints to a text file, or just redirect the print to a file yourself.

 

[JimInKS]

Looked at Karen's Power Tools and that looks promising.

If you want to go a little rube goldberg you could try a parallel to serial converter. Like this:

http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?SKU=232SPS2

Then you could hook the serial port to another pc and capture the data with a terminal emulator program like hyperterminal.

You might even be able to loop the serial port back into the same pc and capture that way.