Siemens PT88 Printer Replacement

[RWAP]

We have been contacted by one company who wish to replace their ancient Siemens PT88 printer (which is connected to a Siemens S5 PLC).

There is very little information about these printers (which date from mid to late 1990s) although Siemens have sent us the few snippets of information which they have managed to find in their archives.

The printers seem to be mainly a plain text serial printer, but with a handful of control codes (eg to select subscript, or change to a German character set). However, the control codes are non-standard.

If anyone has some more information on these printers, then please contact us, as we will be creating a new convertor to process the data and convert it to PDF using the Retro-Printer module.

[RWAP]

After some difficulties in making a correct cable to convert the serial to centronics on the Siemens CP523 serial port module, we have today managed to capture some output from the S5 PLC.

The CP523 uses a non-standard serial port, and it appears to set bit 7 on various characters, which didn't help.

The PT88 convertor will therefore ignore bit 7 for the time being, until we can figure out some more of the control codes.