SiPix Pocket Printer A6

For those who haven't heard of this, it's a small (only a little more than half the size of my 790) thermal printer that connects with PDAs and notebook computers by IrDA. So far I haven't been able to get the CE drivers I have for this to work in anything other than my Compaq Aero 1550 ("1549" ) Pocket PC - little surprise given that the user guide that came with mine only referenced Pocket PCs and not earlier CE devices.

I have not been able to get this Pocket PC driver to work in my H/PC 2000 devices - I only get the illegal operation error message, and thus far I haven't been able to find a combination of DLLs that will make it work. I've done some searching on the Web and found sites claiming that, at some point at least, drivers for this mini-printer were available all the way back to CE 2.0. (The SiPix printer site appears to no longer exist - seems the company abandoned production of the printer a couple of years ago and shifted its focus to digital cameras - and even that site appears to have disappeared.) I'm wondering if anyone here has one of these printers and has drivers for CE 2.xx and/or H/PC 2000 - or if anyone knows of any Web links where these older drivers are still available for download - if indeed they ever existed. (Never hurts to ask.)

Well I don't think six years is too long a time to revive a thread...if nothing new has been posted on it...

First of all the driver search: Total failure...nothing new at all. And I hacked the crap out of the existing MIPS and ARM drivers and could not make them work with either the MP900 or MP790. I mean I was able to correct all the errors on both machines so that everything was fine looking according to executability check...but when I ran the software I got that fatal memory exception error. CE.NET and above...no problem...but CE3 and below...forget it. I substituted every aygshell.dll I could find, swapped out ppc drivers for the hpc drivers...nada...failure...

The only way I could get this to print from my MP790 was using FieldSoftware's PocketClipPrint...which has nice A6 support built into it. That worked fine. For any text, just Ctrl-C it and dump it. For a graphic, use the Microsoft Image Viewer and Ctrl-C it and dump it. No problems.

For those of you who have always wondered how well it works, below are a couple of unretouched scan of both dumps...a graphic dump and a text dump from the 790's clipboard. The graphic image was resized only so that it would fit in this message nicely...but no graphic manipulation...and it looks pretty much exactly as the paper copy I have sitting here.







Attachments
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sipix text dump.jpg (69KB - 2 downloads)
sipix graphic dump.jpg (195KB - 0 downloads)

Seven years, Rich. That's gotta be a record for this site. (And I have a feeling C:Amie is dropping his head on his desk somewhere right now.)

Nice renderings, though. I gotta find my old SiPix A6 and get hold of PocketClipPrint. This is not new info, though - one of our members pointed it out some time ago:

http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=9163

Yeah I know...just thought that some might like to see some print samples to see how well it actually does. I had an A6 and then sold it to someone who really wanted it, and then bought one on eBay last week (auction 221296869237).

Besides, that's what C:Amie gets for making remarks about my feet...or my inability to see them...

For $15 I got the printer, 4 boxes of paper (100 sheets per box), and 12 rolls of thermal paper...plus all the connectors, USB, Serial, etc...

I think I'll keep this one just for when I need to print something out and I'm on vacation with the wife's laptop or whatever....

I ought to ban the pair of you (and your non existent feet) for flouting the rules.






Is it a line mode printer or does it need a GDI driver?

It uses a graphics driver, built into the PrintClip software print engine...I'm not sure if it supports simple line printing. Maybe I'll hook it up to my desktop serial port and just dump some ascii onto it and see what happens...

Other info: The SiPix USB cable is really just a standard Prolific 2303 adapter. The printer itself defaults to 115.2K baudrate, 2 stopbits, and hardware flow control. Here is a printer test of it running from my desktop:





Attachments
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xp test page.jpg (163KB - 0 downloads)

Did it take anything from stdout?

Nope...I write a simple little text file using notepad and saved it. Then I went into the desktops command prompt and tried:

type testfile.txt > ser5: (RETURN)

Nothing happened. In the control panel I set the baud rate, stopbits, and flow control to what the printer is supposed to handle. I then plugged in my MP790 serial cable using a null modem adapter and ran PowertermCE on it...and was able to capture the characters as they came across the serial port just fine...so I know it was working okay. I also tried using the 790 directly with the A6 using the same cable and communcation parameters...but nothing dumped out to the printer at all.

So I have concluded that while the A6 uses serial communication, it isn't a simple line printer like my Okidata ML84, which by the way does work using a simple serial dump...

Oh well, thanks for sharing ^_^