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Printek Emulation
Query Printer Status STX
SYN
Each of these commands returns character strings which provide information regarding the current print buffer
status and the magnetic card reader status. Additionally, SYN will return the current battery voltage.
Each status is returned as an escape sequence and four ASCII hexadecimal digits followed by a Carriage Return
and Line Feed. The hexadecimal digits are nibbles that have been “OR’ed” with 0x30. The statuses returned
for each command are as follows:
Command Returned Strings Comment
STX ESC B b1 b2 b3 b4 CR LF
ESC M m s1 s2 t CR LF
Print Buffer Status
MCR Status
SYN ESC B b1 b2 b3 b4 CR LF
ESC M m s1 s2 t CR LF
ESC V v1 v2 v3 v4 CR LF
Print Buffer Status
MCR Status
Battery Voltage Status
Print Buffer Status String
The print buffer status will be retuned as a four digits representing the number bytes in the buffer that remain to
be processed, divided by 32. For example, if b1-b4 = “0020”, this would indicate that there are at least 20 x 32,
or 640, bytes remaining to be processed. A value of “0000” would indicate that the buffer is empty.
Magnetic Card Reader Status String
The MCR status indicates the presence of a reader in the printer, and if present, its current status.
m “0” if MCR is present. “X” if not installed in printer.
s1, s2 Number of seconds remaining for a good card swipe
before the timeout specified in the read command
occurs. If this value is “00” and a non-zero value for t
is returned, the reader will not time out and must be
cancelled by a Cancel Read Magnetic Card Reader
command.
t The tracks to be read as specified by the read
command. If this value is zero and m and s1, s2 are
also zero, this indicates that the reader is present but
currently disabled (no read pending).
Battery Voltage Status String
This string contains the current battery voltage in millivolts. A string where v1 through v4 contains “7123”
would indicate that the battery voltage is currently 7123 millivolts, or 7.123 volts.
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