wireless scanners & the as400

[abacuscorp]

Good day:

Management has decided to use two wireless scanners to log items from manufacturing into the warehouse and also to verify that the correct items ordered are being packed into the shipping containers. The scanners must interface with a legacy inventory system on the as400.

Has anyone implemented something similiar? Any recommendations on brand of equipment? Anything to avoid? All help would be appreciated. Thanks

Warren

 

[HitechUser]

Warren

Yes I have. There are many ways to do this. Serveral scanner manufacturers actually have 5250 emulation builtin. This way your programmers just code the "green screen" application. The screen sizes vary based on manufacturer.

Also there are other solutions that use TCP/IP as well as other proprietary protocols.

You may find something here..

Terminal emulation

By far the easiest scenario to get up and running is the terminal emulation one. All the DOS based terminals (maybe not the dolphin) support this mode of connection. The emulations supported are the UNIX or PC based VT100/220, 5250 for the AS400 and 3270 for an IBM host. The main advantage to this mode of connection is that the application (and hence the business rules) are under the control of the customer. They can make changes as and when they desire and there will be no financial or hardware implications regarding the wireless devices.

The wireless terminal is just being used as a remote screen and all of the processing is done on the host. If the customer already uses something along the lines of a green screen, they could run these screens on the hand held devices with little modification other than screen mapping/resizing.

If the network is down or the radio connection is lost (terminal out of range) the processing comes to a stop.

Read this article AS/400

Try searching the web for AS/400 or iSeries scanners..

Good Luck...

 

[jmd0252]

Intermec is not too bad,, there is alwys the symbol. There are several companies, that do 5250 interfaces to a wireless device. We have done Intermec to an sql server, then do a screen scrape into the AS400. It works pretty well, all things conmsidered.

 

[abacuscorp]

Hi: Its Warren again.

Has anyone used a product called "Stay-Linked"? I found out about it via a google search (its mentioned everwhere) and the code seems to run on the 400 treating the hand held wireless scanners like dumb terminals. Looks interesting and cheap, but does it work well? thanks

Warren

 

[HitechUser]

Although I have not used Stay-linked, please be careful of software that resides completely on the host. Why you ask? Because it tends to be "release" dependent. When IBM upgrades the OS then the vendor must (or may) need to upgrade the product ($$$ to you).

If you were to purchase a unit (scanner or what have you) that has 5250 emulation "built in". Then it can connect to virtually any version of the OS.

Regardless of what you choose you will still have to code a "green screen" application (as I stated previously). The exception being if you create some sort of client/server application (custom code of the scanner and the host).

Hey just a thought.

 

[abacuscorp]

Thanks Hitechuser

I appreciate the good thoughts and upgrade warnings. When I mentioned in a prior thread that "stay-linked" looked resaonably priced I looked a little further and found that the prices quoted were license fees, not purchase prices. I don't know as of now if these are annual fees and what they include, nor the financial strength of the company and level of support.

It seems that most sites on the web are reluctant to quote prices when it comes to computer related hardware/software issues. If I wanted a shirt or coat the price would be right there. Not a slam at "stay-linked" or others but it sems that they should be more forthcomming on pricing.

Warren