Need Help With Red Lion

My company has a Red Lion G3 HMI, we also have 2 leibinger Jet 3 Ink Jet printers that are tied to the HMI. With this set of machines we have a programmer that tied them all together with a linux operated server. Long story short I have to get the Printers to talk directly to the HMI. Is there certian drivers i haev to use, or does anyone know that if the leibinger printers can send codes straight to the HMI. I see that the Red Lion can use C code to operate certian inputs and commands. Can anyone help me with some source code, ideas or a way i can test to get the printers to talk directly to the HMI.

So what role does the Linux system play? Can you use the Linux to do a screen print?

The server is running all the commo it seems. The printers send the print ready and all the other parameters to the server then the server then sends the parameters to the red lion. What i am trying to do is have the red lion get the print codes so i can just use them for a user interface. No data will be transfered from them both, just a bit to turn on a light. What i can seem to understand is how the linux server is communcating to the red lion and visa versa. I know once i get how they are passing the data from one to the other it wont be hard to figure out how to turn on the light once i get the bit for commands. I also have 3 counters that i have to get to talk to to the red lion, The counters are a CUB 5 counter but all 3 of them are being plugged into a 6 port RJ adapter. Since the counters dont have a IP address how can the red lion determine what counter is what. All counters and the adapter is a red lion brand

Post the program and I will try to look at it.

Thats the issue lol the programmer will not let me look at his source code. But this is a programmer that released his program to us without debugging it. So tjhe programmer wants me to see if i can get as much as the user interface straight to the printers by tomorrow morning without letting me see any of his source code. and where I stand is, i have never used red lion and never programed in it. so it puts me in a huge issue by tomorrow morning. and when it comes to material all i have is the red lion HMI code that is not complete, but i will post that.

OK i didn't see much information about communication protocols on Leibinger Jet 3 Ink website.

I assume you have the protocol already because you are reading from port 4 and doing some actions off of that data.

The following is SWAG. They original developer is sending info out the TCP/IP port to 1234 and you are reading that data. If this is the case you may be able to set it up so you can sent info back out that port to the Printer.

Since I don't have the protocol or any knowledge of this product I would see why they have an embedded windows CE HMI on this system? Why is there a Linux server setting there in the mix as well? Why do you need a RedLion G3 to handle all the data? it looks like Jet 3 have physical I/O so you would just trigger the print function off of them I ASSuME?There are a lot of variable that we need to know before we can really do anything else.

Yes the Jet 3 does have a I/O that can be sent through a serial port, how ever the programmer is getting the data from the linux software some how. the way its set up is both printers have their own IP address with port. The server has its own IP and also the HMI. And after looking at all the possablities the HMI can handle i truthly dont know why we are using the linux stuff now. The printers have their own Windows CE program they are using for user interface, so we should have just used the printers straight to the HMI and allowed the HMI to handle our SQL data base that we are running. So i ask in the proto call i am now assuming that i must have all the IPs set in the IP table in the TCP/IP routing table. right? After that i should just be able to set up tags and write command codes to pull the parameters out of the printer just as the programmer is on the server right? If so do you know what the command line would look like if lets say the printer was on 128.7.6.45 IP

The protocol will dictate what the commands look like
again SWAG I would ASSuME that in the packet going to the printer you would have the printable string. Without really knowing the application it is hard to help.

did you have any luck with this system?

well no luck but after all this and the talking with the buyer we all decided to just take out the user interface with the status lights. But the rest of the commo I got that up and running. The orginal programmer did not have the CUB counters programmed right so that was a easy fix after i figure out how to set them up right. Thank you for all your help and I am sure i will use this forum again on upcoming issues