[vox-tech] computer pretending to be a printer

[Ken Bloom]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 10:00:57 -0800
Dylan Beaudette <dylan at iici.no-ip.org> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> We have a rather expensive analytical machine in our department that
> provides few options for saving its output to file. The manual
> suggests that it can be used via windows networking to save its data
> to a remove windows share over ethernet.

Mark Kim beat me to this answer :( while I was still typing it

You could put the linux box in the same room, and connect the linux box
to the machine by ethernet and use a Samba share to save the data on a
filesystem.

You could also make the linux box into a router and use wireless uplink
to connect to the network that you use all of your other machines on.
Kind of the reverse of an access point. I know there are people on this
list who have done this before at Installfests, so they could tell you
how to do this.


> There is currently no way to get an ethernet cable into this room, 
> so that is out of the question for now.... In place of saving an
> electronic copy of the output, the machine sends data to printer. This
> is most annoying as it can use lots of ink, and the printer has a
> tendancy to jam - and if it doesn't get printed, then the results are
> lost!
> 
> So here is the idea... Would it be possible to setup a simple linux
> box connected to the printer port (i think that it is a standard
> parallel port) of the machine, and have the linux box filter the
> information and save it to a file? being a PPC person I have no idea
> if this is even possible with the protocol used for parallel
> printers... but i thought that it would be interesting to try. 

I'm googling this - it seems that with the right kind of cable you could
do it, but it's too fraught with uncertainty.

-- 
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