Driving USB printer from parallel port

I am looking for an adaptor to drive a USB printer from the parallel port of my Citect SCADA PC. I understand that such adaptors exist and that they require a power source that can be obtained using an additional cable from one of the PC's other ports.

Has anybody had experience with these and can recommend any particular one to me.

Google finds many adaptors that work the other way driving a parallel printer from a USB port. These are of course of no use to me.

I have some of these http://www.epapersign.com/parallel2usb/ in the same setup and have never had a single problem.

This software http://www.printfil.com/english.htm will do it also but it is for a windows machine running dos applications running dos under windows.

There are also several ways to do this with dos running in a virtual machine but that is a bit more time consuming setup.

I have done this all 3 ways i have listed here and have some of each running on the factory floor but the converter module setup is the most simple way IMHO but i just depends on the application you are running in my case i have to do much more than print so if you are just printing the converter would be best for you.

Hey noob - A slightly off topic, but you mentioned that you use(d) printfil.

I bought that with the express purpose of merging a graphic into the (text) output from a DOS program, sending it/them to a Epson dot-matrix printer.

Have you done something similar? If so, would you share your config file(s), with the parameters? My printouts come out "wrapped".

How are you merging the graphic to the text?

What is the final file format you are sending to the printer?

I think I will go for a hardware Parallel to USB adaptor.

I will look at the one from epapersign.

Anybody had experience with any other brand?

I purchased the LPT2USB device from epapersign but cannot get it to work.
I am trying to print a word document from a PC running XP Pro as a test.
Has anybody had experience with LPT2USB ?

I now have a replacement LPT2USB device as epapersign thought the original was faulty. However, I cannot get it to print.

My PC is a Compaq Evo desktop about 5 years old.
Running XP Pro with service pack 2.

My test printer is an HP Deskjet 948c which has both parallel and USB ports and I have cables for both.

I can print without problems from for example a Word or Notepad document via either the parallel or the USB port.

If I install the LPT2USB and power it either with the supplied cable from the keyboard connector (5 VDC) or from my mobile phone charger (9 VDC) and connect the USB cable to the printer it does not print.

Interestingly, if I then connect the parallel cable from the PC to the printer the document then prints.

I have tried changing the BIOS settings that provides 3 options:
EPP + ECP this is the default setting.
Output-Only
Bi-Directional
None of these gets it working with LPT2USB device.

Hopefully somebody can help me to understand this problem.

Have you tried these guys John?
http://www.mgram.com.au/index.php?osCsid=b07e5930970ebee63e0350d676e30193
I have had success with their stuff in the past.

Thanks Bob, I will check if they have a parallel to USB converter although I can't find one on their website.

I am thinking now that the LPT2USB adaptors I have are perhaps uni-directional and thus only suitable for older printers. Even the 5 year old HP 948c I am using must send control information back to the driver. I guess the driver will not work without these confirmation signals.

I will try to get an older printer and try that to help my understanding although the printer I want to drive is a current model installed on a Citect / Siemens system I installed in Manila.

What I really need to do is to solve my problem of printing reports from Citect to a USB printer whilst running XP Pro. I can print OK but it uses a FONT that is proportional and my data columns don't line up. I am using Citect V5.5
I had no problems printing with either Windows 2000 or with XP Pro using a parallel printer.

Hi John
I did not have time to look yesterday. They have 2 parallel to USB converters and they are powered by the USB port.
One is listed as bidirectional but I do not know if it will do what you require.
Give them a ring - I have generally found them to be helpfull.
The other alternative may be CardBus to USB converter, if the laptop can take CardBus. They have those.

Thanks again Bob,
I checked the website again but only found 2 USB to Parallel converters. I need Parallel to USB to print from PC Parallel port to a smart USB Printer.
However, I will give them a call on Monday.

I think I understand my problem with the LPT2USB converter.

I borrowed an older printer (HP 930c) that is not so smart as the 948c. It works fine with the LPT2USB.
I guess the LPT2USB is only uni-directional and doesn't pass back to the PC the status information that the driver expects.

I might for my own education see if the 948c will work with the 930c driver but that wont solve my real problem. The printer I have in Manila is a current model with scanner and will definately need bi-directional support.

Hi, I am aware that this thread is now over 12 months old, but I came across it recently while doing a Google search and thought I should comment. I purchased the LPT2USB device in question just recently and cannot get it to work on ANY of the modern USB printers that I have tried it on. I always get a "printer not responding" or "printer not communicating" error message. According to the troubleshooting site for the device, you may need to disable bidirectional printing, in which case I just get an error message saying "please enable bidirectional printing". lol!
They also recommend that you set your Print Processor as WinPrint RAW. But I tried that and no go either. Basically the device is useless except perhaps on the older less intelligent, unidirectional printers, such as the HP 930c, as John suggests in his post above.
I asked the company for a list of printers on which it would work but they would not supply this, claiming that all computers/printers behave differently. Yet they virtually assured me that it would work. I guess I should have read between the lines then and there and realized that the device is in truth very fussy. This is a shame because the device is quite expensive.

The best method for getting USB to work on an old computer that I have found is to connect it to a more modern computer through an ethernet network cable. Download software like the popular "USB Over Network" (install the host program on host PC and client on old PC), install the printer driver on your old PC, then print through the network cable using the host PC's printer connection. This works extremely well. Only problem I have had is that the spooling process sometimes leaves a nasty cache file on the host PC which I have to delete next time I boot up. Otherwise the host PC thinks it has something in memory that still needs to be printed and this can slow my host computer down to a crawl. There is probably a way to avoid this, but I have not yet discovered the solution.

I have tried USB 1.0 and 1.1 PCI cards in my older PC and these will not work. The networking method is the only way I have ever been able to get some form of USB functionality on my old PC, even it is completely virtual.

Interesting write-up. Thanks for the update.

Any reason why this would not also be a good option?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833156025