Show total amount on pole display when 'settle' is clicked on Pos screen

[Thala]

Hi Every One…!
I have only a LED8 display (Only one amount can be shown). What I would like to do is the following:

1- Customer orders 2 coffee’s of $1 each: Display shows $2.00
2- Customer orders 1 Pie of 1.50: Display shows $1.50
3- Customer indicates that that completes their order, Cashier clicks ‘Settle’ and moves to payment screen: Display shows $3.50

Is there a solution for this?

[JTRTech]

Once you have the display hooked up and receiving it should be relatively simple.
Have used a two line pole display in the past and once connected programing the output was pretty easy.
The trickier part is getting the pole connected and configured as many types out there.

You pretty much treat the pole as a printer and set print template for the required output and set when it updates and with which template.
The template tags are listed beside the template in that screen, think your first one is the one which is along the lines of {LINE TOTAL} - sory not at PC to check the exact tag.
And the total is again pretty simple.
These would be fired on an order added rule for the item(s) value and settle automation command probably for the total.
You may want to set a template for something like welcome to xxxxx to clear the screen after ticket is closed as they generally display the last message until updated which would be the last sale total.

[Jesse]

@Thala no need to create another question about same thing you will not get faster answers. Please be patient with community when you make multiple threads about same thing community might get annoyed and not answer.

If you don’t get answer it means you did not provide enough information or your question can not be understood enough for community to be interested.

[QMcKay]

This is a simple setup. You should read the Tutorial. It explains how to do what you want exactly.

Pole Display / Customer Display / VFD

First of all, you need to determine how your Display is connected to the computer, and how it communicates. If you cannot figure out this information, it will be very difficult to get your Display working with SambaPOS. There are many types of Displays, though most of them will communicate in a serial fashion via a serial port or COM emulation via USB. The following screenshots show a Display connected via USB, that the Driver emulates as a serial port on COM2. This Display requires a drive…

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The Settle button is an Automation Command. In a Rule, you check for execution of that Automation Command, and fire an Action to Execute a Print Job.

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Printer Template:

[LAYOUT]
<R> 
<J>Pd:{TENDERED TOTAL}| Chg:{CHANGE TOTAL}
<R>Total: {TICKET TOTAL}

[markjw]

@Thala like I said in your original question you reposted here. You need to find out how LED8 display works it won’t work like others comment because those are for VFD type.

If you don’t have a manual and cannot get something to show using echo test in command prompt, you have no hope getting further with using in sambapos. Please first get display to show something then read manual or at least post here some more useful info so community can help you.

[JTRTech]

@Thala
FYI markjw is taking a closer look at your model of pole display, seems you might have difficulties, follow his new topic on this

Port Printer appears to be fixed at 9600 baud

I am testing a customer display based on a question someone had on the forum. It is an LED8 display I had lying around and as someone asked, I thought I was just see if I can get SambaPOS to work with it. I can get it working fine via command prompt. The customer display comes on at 2400 baud, even it can be set to 9600, it goes back to 2400 when powered on again. So I have tried setting Windows settings for the COM port (COM2 in my case) to 2400, but SambaPOS won’t send to it. If I send a …

[markjw]

@Thala

1- Customer orders 2 coffee’s of $1 each: Display shows $2.002- Customer orders 1 Pie of 1.50: Display shows $1.503- Customer indicates that that completes their order, Cashier clicks ‘Settle’ and moves to payment screen: Display shows $3.50

Ok I managed to get the LED8 display I have working! I have it set up similar as you requested, except I added within the logic I already have (as I have a different customer display so I just added on the execute print job actions to those existing rules I had).

With the model I got, I ran into a few problems, one is the baud rate which I posted separately, still unresolved so this could be a problem, I might have a workaround for that but rather wait to see what others come back with on that separate issue. That aside, this display for some reason will only take one line command per print job, i.e. I cannot clear the display AND add the ticket total, I must do it in 2 separate print jobs. If you add multiple lines in the template it just ignores all but the last line. Therefore, I created multiple additional print templates, print jobs and actions and they must be added in order, e.g.

1. Clear Customer Display
2. Update Customer Display (ticket total, change, etc)
3. (optional) Turn on price / total / collect / change light

This is the only way I could do it, tried other ways to no success.

My basic logic / flow for customer display, amended for this LED8:

1. Create / open existing ticket - display shows total with total light
2. Add order to ticket - display shows individual item price and quantity separated by “-”. Note this display will ignore any space character, and only other character I can use other than number is “-”. You can change this how you want if you don’t want quantity shown or if you want to show order total * quantity. I felt adding quantity was a nice touch but there is not a lot you can do with the limitations of this display.
3. Go to Settle / payment screen - display shows total with total light
4. Add part payment (skipped if only one payment type used) - display shows amount paid with collect light
5. After payment made - display shows change and change light
6. Close ticket / logout - clears display

So here is a video of it working:

- YouTube

Quick Overview Guide

Ok so I am not going to explain here the various rules you have to set up to use a customer display, as this is explained in detail in this tutorial by @QMcKay , which I suggest you read through first. I will also try to keep this short with regards to steps you will have learnt in the tutorial, and will go into more detail about dealing with this specific type of customer display.

Pole Display / Customer Display / VFD

First of all, you need to determine how your Display is connected to the computer, and how it communicates. If you cannot figure out this information, it will be very difficult to get your Display working with SambaPOS. There are many types of Displays, though most of them will communicate in a serial fashion via a serial port or COM emulation via USB. The following screenshots show a Display connected via USB, that the Driver emulates as a serial port on COM2. This Display requires a drive…

There are a few quirks I have had with this LED8 customer display, such as:

1. Baud rate defaults to 2400 baud, but because SambaPOS appears to expect 9600 baud, it won’t work immediately unless there is another fix for this later on, However I have a workaround for this that I will post at the end.
2. This display only supports numeric characters, the “-” character and decimal point “.”. It does not appear to support the space character, so any spacing would require use of commands. One quirk is that although the display is 8 characters x 1 line, the decimal point is not considered one of those 8 characters (just like on a typical calculator), so this may cause issues with long numbers - I have not tested that.
3. Display will only take 1 line of commands / text per print job. So, you have to have separate print jobs for each command you want to send (more below).
4. Display ignores all formatting tags. I cannot get <R> to work to right align the numbers (likely because it doesn’t support the space character). Also, <J> to justify (e.g. <J>|10.00) throws an error. You could try using some calculation or JScript function (in V5) but likely you will run into problems due to point 2 and 3 above if tried.

I’ve used this manual I found online for reference of the command codes for this display. The manual is not for the model I have, but it worked. Likely it will work with yours too, but no guarantee!

Ok so here goes…

Create Printer
Change COM port to whichever one you connect to. Set line count to 1 and line character count to 8.

Create Printer Templates for Commands
You will need to create a few Printer Templates for printer commands:

LED8 Clear (to clear the display)

<XCT>12

LED8 Light ON (create one each for Price / Total / Collect / Change)

<XCT>27,115,49 - Price
<XCT>27,115,50 - Total
<XCT>27,115,51 - Collect
<XCT>27,115,52 - Change

There is also a command to turn off all lights, however it is not needed as the Clear command does this too. For clarification, I am referring to the “lights” as these 4 text lights that appear below the digits:

Create Print Jobs & Actions for Commands
You need to create a Print Job and an associated Execute Print Job Action for each of the above Printer Templates. Refer to the tutorial I referenced above if you need full instructions on how to do this.

Printer Templates suggested for the LED8 customer display
If you follow the tutorial referenced above, you will create a number of Printer Templates to display on your customer display. Here are my suggestions for this model:

LED8 Items - to display item price & quantity

{ORDERS}

[ORDERS]
{TOTAL}-{QUANTITY}

LED8 Total - to display ticket total

{TICKET TOTAL}

LED8 Payment - to display payments made in payment screen

{PAYMENTS}

[PAYMENTS]
{TENDERED}

LED8 Paid - to display change

{CHANGE TOTAL}

Additional Actions when creating Rules for displaying on customer display
When you create your Rules to display various output to the customer display, you must add additional Actions on the Rule to send commands as well.

Example 1: Displaying Item price / quantity
For any Rule where you send text to the customer display, you must first clear the display. You do this by adding your “LED8 Clear” action first before your action to send the text.

Example 2: Displaying Total
If you also want to turn on one of the lights under the digits, you must in addition add the relevant action AFTER your clear action (if you add it before the clear, the clear action will turn off the light).

So with the above combined with the main tutorial, you should have your LED8 customer display working with SambaPOS!

Workaround for Baud Rate Issue

For dealing with the issue where it appears not possible to get SambaPOS to use 2400 baud (the default setting on my LED8 customer display) regardless of the Windows setting for the COM port, I have devised a workaround to set the customer display to work on 9600 baud mode. The model I have resets back to 2400 baud each time it is turned on or reset, so typically you will need to repeat this process each time you restart your system. I recommend putting commands into a .bat file then setting to run on startup.

For those who just want the solution quickly, I have put together a batch script along with 2 text files that contain the control codes to send to the customer display to change the baud rate and to clear the display. You can download it here:

init_led8.zip (450 Bytes)

You just need to edit the “init_led8.bat” file to change the COM port to the one you have connected your customer display to. For example, if you have connected to COM3, change all references of COM2 to COM3.

For those who want more information on how this works, here goes:

1. You need to be able to send control codes to the customer display from the command prompt. You cannot type these codes directly on your keyboard, however you can use the MSDOS based Edit command (included in all versions of Windows) to create a text file containing these control codes. You can read a full guide here on how to do this, but basically from command prompt you just run “Edit”, then you will be presented with the editor tool. For example, to create the control code to clear the display (ASCII code in decimal - 12), press Ctrl+P, then hold down Alt and type 12, then release the Alt key. You will then see a single character / symbol appear. Save this file with whatever name you wish. You will need 2 of these files - one to set the baud rate to 9600 and another to clear the display. Refer to the PDF manual link above for the control codes I used.
2. I suggest you create a batch file and add all commands there (available in the download above). But I will detail the steps here you can follow manually to learn how it works.
   From command prompt, type: MODE COM2 2400, N, 8,1
   (replace COM2 with the COM port you have connected the customer display to).
   This will set the COM port to match the current baud rate (2400) of the customer display. If you don’t do this, you cannot communicate with the device.
3. Type copy /b set9600.dat COM2: - this copies the file you created in step 1 (here named set9600.dat) to send the control code to set the device to 9600 baud. My customer display then shows a confirmation message like this:
   
   
4. As you have now changed the baud rate of the device, you must also change the baud rate of the COM port to match that of the device, so you can continue communicating with the device. Type MODE COM2 9600, N, 8,1 to set the COM port to 9600 baud
   (replace COM2 with the COM port you have connected the customer display to).
5. Finally, type copy /b clr.dat COM2: - this copies the other file you created in step 1 (here named clr.dat) to send the control code to clear the display. This step isn’t mandatory, but is good to clear off any confirmation message left on the customer display after step 3. If no such message is shown on your device, you can skip this step.

That’s it!

Thanks @Thala for the original question I’ve been meaning to try out the LED8 customer display I bought on a whim when visiting a supplier in China a couple years back. Hope this guide is useful to others as well!

[Thala]

@markjw @JTRTech @QMcKay Thank you all very much for your support.

i followed all the things from A to Z as per @markjw guidance.
Now i having two Issues.

Issue 1:

i have tested my LED8 Pole display with baud 2400 through
CMD->echo test and numbers are appeared on Display.
but while i’m trying with baud 9600 it’s does not show anything on display.
My display supports only baud 2400.

Issue 2:

In Samba POS Application when i clicked settle button,Some
(Total Amount) Number Appeared on display but this number is not exact total amount.(wrong total amount appeared on display)
and print template of Clear Customer Display not working properly.

kindly provide your suggestion. Thanks in advance.

Guys i downloaded that zip file and tested baud rate as per the discussion.

step 1: (cmd)

MODE COM2 2400, N, 8,1

step 2:

copy /b set9600.dat COM2
1 file(s) copied

after entered step 2 nothing appeared on LED pole display.

now i’m moved with pos 3 on xp… but same issue repeated.

[QMcKay]

Try a different Tag…

{TOTAL AMOUNT}
{TICKET TOTAL}
etc.

The tags are listed to the right of the Template. Try them out to see what works for you.

[markjw]

@Thala

i have tested my LED8 Pole display with baud 2400 through CMD->echo test and numbers are appeared on Display.but while i’m trying with baud 9600 it’s does not show anything on display.My display supports only baud 2400.

Did you follow the guide with regards to the workaround of baud rate? Did you download the zip file, alter the files as specified and run them? Possibly your display uses different control codes, only hope you have there is to check manual that comes with it or you can try to find online or ask where you purchased from.

However the fact your Issue 2 exists tells me you don’t have the Issue 1 problem…

@Thala

In Samba POS Application when i clicked settle button,Some (Total Amount) Number Appeared on display but this number is not exact total amount.(wrong total amount appeared on display)and print template of Clear Customer Display not working properly.

What came on the display? Make a simple order with $1 items then you can work out where is going wrong. Are you using the same tag as I mentioned? Double check your rules and actions. Or try other tags @QMcKay suggested. Maybe you can post here the printer template you used and also what comes on the display?