WP 34S printing scrambled text on HP82240B

[Kaiserpat]

Hello All.

This is my fist post on the Forum, and for starters I'd like to thank all those who contributed to my success in turning a shoddy 20b into my new amazing 34S. I have a 30b shipping over, which means I'll be perfecting my soldering and overlay glueing skills a little further...

I also purchased a HP 82240B printer (I have absolutely no need for one, but I'm sure most of you know how one can get carried away with these gadgets), and have, of course, installed the complete calc_ir_full.bin file and the IR diode, which, according to the calculator's self-test seems to be installed correctly. The issue I have, however, is that when I send a Print Stack command to my printer (the only one I know how to currently send), only a few lines of scrambled text come out (see attachment).

   

It does this once, and then nothing further can be printed, only after turning the printer off and on again.

The printer's self-test comes out OK (holding feed while turning it on), but seeing as I have absolutely no experience with such devices, that may not mean much. Also, I have no other IR-capable calculator to test it with, nor another printer to test the calculator with.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[BobVA]

Can you tell if your crystal is operating correctly?

If so, have you tried putting the printer closer to the calculator?

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

Also, if the printer is running on batteries you may need to increase the line feed delay:
h MODE ^ ^ (until •DLAY shows up) ENTER d,
Where • is the printer symbol character and d is the delay in tenths of seconds.

[Katie Wasserman]

Also, Did you try a printer self-test? Turn on the printer while holding down the paper advance button. It should print out its full character set (several lines of text) followed by the battery level (a number from 1 to 5).

[emece67]

(05-18-2016 03:59 PM)Kaiserpat Wrote:  [...]
and the IR diode, which, according to the calculator's self-test seems to be installed correctly.
[...]

Are you aware that the IR printer needs, not only the IR LED, but also the 32768 Hz quartz crystal?

[Kaiserpat]

(05-18-2016 11:18 PM)BobVA Wrote:  Can you tell if your crystal is operating correctly?

If so, have you tried putting the printer closer to the calculator?

The crystal is installed and works fine, I've tried all distances.

(05-19-2016 01:56 AM)Gerson W. Barbosa Wrote:  Also, if the printer is running on batteries you may need to increase the line feed delay:
h MODE ^ ^ (until •DLAY shows up) ENTER d,
Where • is the printer symbol character and d is the delay in tenths of seconds.

I'm actually running it off a 12V DC 1A power supply.

(05-19-2016 02:17 AM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  Also, Did you try a printer self-test? Turn on the printer while holding down the paper advance button. It should print out its full character set (several lines of text) followed by the battery level (a number from 1 to 5).

Katie, first of all, you were among the greatest help to me when researching how to turn my 20b into 34S, so thank you very much for that. I did do a self-test, and it comes out perfect...

(05-19-2016 11:34 AM)emece67 Wrote:  

(05-18-2016 03:59 PM)Kaiserpat Wrote:  [...]
and the IR diode, which, according to the calculator's self-test seems to be installed correctly.
[...]

Are you aware that the IR printer needs, not only the IR LED, but also the 32768 Hz quartz crystal?

I wasn't aware that printing required the crystal, but it is installed nonetheless and works fine.

Thanks for all your input guys and gals, but I think that the problem lies with the printer. I opened it up and it seems that many components have been changed (including the IR receiver). I have no idea for what purpose that printer was used and will probably never find out as the person who sold it to me bought a whole lot from some small IT company that went bust. Also, and more conclusively, I managed to cheaply acquire a 39G+ graphic calculator, and the result is the same (i.e. scrambled text until the printer buffer fills up). The guy's sending me another printer, we'll see if that one works, I'll let you know if it does.

[BobVA]

(05-20-2016 01:45 PM)Kaiserpat Wrote:  I opened it up and it seems that many components have been changed (including the IR receiver). I have no idea for what purpose that printer was used and will probably never find out...

Interesting! If you get a chance to post some photos of what you found, I'm sure we'd all enjoy a look at it. I wonder if HP OEM'ed that (like the BlankNut or the HP-1000CX), provided just the mechanical parts ,or if the other company modified retail printers?
No extra labels, special markings, etc. on the outside? I hope they didn't make too many of them, as that could be a real trap on the surplus market.

At least you have a nice collection of mechanics for spare parts.

[Paul Dale]

(05-18-2016 11:18 PM)BobVA Wrote:  Can you tell if your crystal is operating correctly?

The stopwatch and printer images won't start if the crystal isn't present. If the calculator works, the crystal is okay -- it might be the wrong frequency still.


Pauli

[Marcus von Cube]

Much of the data is sent out as graphics. Can you print a single character from the alpha register with pMODE set to 0, such as an "A"? This will be sent literally in print mode 0.

Maybe a sequence of uppercase U will help diagnose the problem. This is a pattern of alternating ones and zeros.

[Kaiserpat]

(05-20-2016 11:32 PM)BobVA Wrote:  

(05-20-2016 01:45 PM)Kaiserpat Wrote:  I opened it up and it seems that many components have been changed (including the IR receiver). I have no idea for what purpose that printer was used and will probably never find out...

Interesting! If you get a chance to post some photos of what you found, I'm sure we'd all enjoy a look at it. I wonder if HP OEM'ed that (like the BlankNut or the HP-1000CX), provided just the mechanical parts ,or if the other company modified retail printers?
No extra labels, special markings, etc. on the outside? I hope they didn't make too many of them, as that could be a real trap on the surplus market.

At least you have a nice collection of mechanics for spare parts.

I received a number of other printers from the same supplier for testing and they all do exactly the same (garbled gibberish). Not just with my 34S, but also with the 39g+ I just bought for testing. After opening another printer, I noticed that it has the same set-up as the one I opened before. So I wonder if that company from whom my supplier bought them may have repurposed them, rather than badly repaired them?

I have taken some pictures and attached them. I noticed that the original IR sensor is no longer there, and some dodgy connections via the blue/grey/purple wires have been made to a capacitor and another component.

   
   
   

If I knew what the original components were and had a schematic for the printer, I'm sure I'd be able to put it back in its former, working order. I've searched online, but so far nothing....

Maybe Katie Wasserman has some pictures of an 82240B printer with its original set-up?

(05-22-2016 09:36 PM)Marcus von Cube Wrote:  Much of the data is sent out as graphics. Can you print a single character from the alpha register with pMODE set to 0, such as an "A"? This will be sent literally in print mode 0.

Maybe a sequence of uppercase U will help diagnose the problem. This is a pattern of alternating ones and zeros.

I tried that and nothing happens. Not even a line feed. But maybe given the "state" of the printer's insides, that's no longer surprising.

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

That sensor that is on the underside of the circuit board that is grafted on looks like the sort that used for IrDA, and I wonder if the WCE written on the label may be for WindowsCE, if you had an older laptop with IrDA or a Windows CE handheld you could give that a try. I could take pictures of the board for you. There is a schematic of the A version at http://www.hpmuseum.net/document.php?hwfile=3610 I would not expect there to be a lot of hardware difference between the two versions.
Update:

Pictures of the front and back of the board may be found at https://picasaweb.google.com/10273141276...directlink The pictures are too big to be attachment. The board is a simple single sided board board which should make things easy. It would appear the only things missing, judging by your pictures, is the IR detector and a 3 leg 10uF capacitor immediately behind it. At first glance it does seem to be very similar to the A version. The only makings on the IR detector are 302 4Z.

[damaltor]

The Printers A and B share the same hardware as far as i remember, the only difference is a different character set in ROM.

[Kaiserpat]

(05-23-2016 09:14 PM)Paul Berger (Canada) Wrote:  That sensor that is on the underside of the circuit board that is grafted on looks like the sort that used for IrDA, and I wonder if the WCE written on the label may be for WindowsCE, if you had an older laptop with IrDA or a Windows CE handheld you could give that a try. I could take pictures of the board for you. There is a schematic of the A version at http://www.hpmuseum.net/document.php?hwfile=3610 I would not expect there to be a lot of hardware difference between the two versions.
Update:

Pictures of the front and back of the board may be found at https://picasaweb.google.com/10273141276...directlink The pictures are too big to be attachment. The board is a simple single sided board board which should make things easy. It would appear the only things missing, judging by your pictures, is the IR detector and a 3 leg 10uF capacitor immediately behind it. At first glance it does seem to be very similar to the A version. The only makings on the IR detector are 302 4Z.

Thanks so much for your input. The pictures will be of great help to me. I just need to find compatible IR sensors here in Brazil, which may prove difficult, alternatively mail order some from abroad.

[Sylvain Cote]

(05-24-2016 11:06 AM)damaltor Wrote:  The Printers A and B share the same hardware as far as i remember, the only difference is a different character set in ROM.

Excerpt from Richard J. Nelson HP-82240B Article in HP Solve #18

IR Printer: "A" Vs. "B" Model
The HP 82240A IR Printer was first introduced in late 1986.
Because it is a graphics printer the bottom of characters with descenders (lower case g, j, q, & y) touch the character below it.
An improved model, the HP 82240B was introduced in late 1989.

The "B" printer model has four improvements.

1. The "B" printer has an improved character set.
   The "A" version uses the Roman8 character set.
   This was modified to reduce the height of most upper case letters from seven dots high to six dots high.
   This improved readability with most character combinations providing two dots of interline spacing.
2. The "B" printer added a second (default) character set called ISO 8859-1, renamed ECMA 94.
   The "A" default character set is Roman8.
3. The "B" printer added a ten minute auto shutoff to conserve batteries.
   Leave the "A" printer on for two days and your batteries are completely DEAD!
4. The "B" printer added a red power-on indicator on the left front panel near the IR detector.
   

edit: typo

[Christoph Giesselink]

(05-27-2016 12:46 AM)Sylvain Cote Wrote:  Excerpt from Richard J. Nelson HP-82240B Article in HP Solve #18

Nice find. Just made a copy of the Roman8 font of the HP82240B and modified it to the Roman8 font of the HP82240A. And of course I found a wrong or better say "not original" character drawing in my HP82240B implementation.

Had to pick up my single HP82240A printer (among many other HP82240B printers) to make a self test to get the orientation of some characters which are not clear from the manual.

Not clearly yet what I want to do with it, maybe adding a switcher in my HP82240B printer simulation to simulate the HP82240A printer with the correct font?

[matthiaspaul]

(05-31-2016 10:25 PM)Christoph Giesselink Wrote:  Just made a copy of the Roman8 font of the HP82240B and modified it to the Roman8 font of the HP82240A. And of course I found a wrong or better say "not original" character drawing in my HP82240B implementation.

Had to pick up my single HP82240A printer (among many other HP82240B printers) to make a self test to get the orientation of some characters which are not clear from the manual.

Do you perhaps mean the small subscript and superscript indices in the 0x95 - 0x9F range?

I recently wrote an article about the HP Roman 8 character set and its variants and for this I tried to derive a translation of the HP 82240A character set to matching Unicode glyphs. This is what I came up with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Roman#M...HP_Roman-8

Does the mapping you use in your printer simulator differ? If so, this would be interesting for me to know in order to possibly improve the article.

I have also a number of detail questions regarding the modified HP Roman 8 and ISO 8859-1 variants used in the calculators. As you have closely studied the fonts, perhaps you can answer some of them? See:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-6763.html

(08-30-2016 04:02 PM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  - Regarding the modified HP Roman-8 character set used on early HP RPL calculators like the HP-28C/HP-28S (and the HP-18C) and the HP 82240A printer, does someone know an official name for that variant? Some of the added characters are very odd, others duplicate already existing characters. There certainly is some history to this particular extension. Why were these characters chosen, when exactly and by whom? Which other calculators used this character set? Were there other printers but the HP 82240A/B to use this? AFAIK the HP-28 could only display characters up to 147, probably because of limited ROM space, but why did it duplicate the guillemets at 146/147 (or are they different from 251/253), and what is the purpose of the "LF" character at 144? Why did the printers support such a large number of strange superscript and subscript indices? And what is the purpose of this strange graphical symbol at 148?

- Are there any official mappings from HP Roman-8 to Unicode? Or does someone have an overview of the different mappings introduced in HP and third-party software products (including emulators)? If possible I would like to document the specific differences.

(05-31-2016 10:25 PM)Christoph Giesselink Wrote:  Not clearly yet what I want to do with it, maybe adding a switcher in my HP82240B printer simulation to simulate the HP82240A printer with the correct font?

Not directly related, but given that the definition of the ISO 8859-1-based character set variants supported by the HP 38/48, HP 49/50 and HP 39/40 differ slightly, perhaps your simulator could add optional support for the euro character € at 0xA0 and the small superscript -1 at 0xB3 even though the real HP 82240B doesn't support this? See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPL_charac...age_layout

Greetings,

Matthias