Introduction; Overview; Events And Actions; The Hardware - Printronix P5000 Series User Manual

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Overview

This document describes the Printronix General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO)
function available for the Printronix T5000 series Thermal printers and the
P5000 series Line Matrix printers.
GPIO is both hardware and software. The hardware is the I/O board to be
mounted in the printer
the Printronix Remote Management Software Advanced Tool Kit. The GPIO
hardware is a printed circuit board containing optically isolated inputs and
outputs as well as relays. The GPIO software is both a printer resident GPIO
event parser and a PC-based GPIO manager that allows the user to define
how the general purpose I/O hardware should behave for the given
application.

Events and Actions

The operation of GPIO is based on Events and Actions. Events can be either
printer internal such as "paper out" or "print complete," or they can be printer
external such as "opto-coupler 1 active." Actions are the result of (or the
reaction to) an event and can be printer internal such as "paper feed" or
printer external such as "relay 1 active" or "reply to host" where data is
transmitted over the serial, parallel, or network interface. You can also define
a number of events to be acted upon without the GPIO card installed in the
printer, which allows the printer to be adapted for the application in use.

The Hardware

The GPIO hardware (see Figure 1 on page 8) consists of 16 opto-couplers,
4 SPDT relays, a real time clock, and the logic required to connect this
hardware into the printing system.
NOTE: Although the GPIO hardware includes a real time clock, it will not be

Introduction

,
and the software is the GPIO Manager which is part of
described in this manual. Its programming and use are strongly
related to PGL and equivalent languages, and those manuals
document the real time clock.
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