Customer Case Studies: Boca Systems Use WinDriver USB

Boca Systems manufactures the Ghostwriter family of ticket printers, the most flexible and powerful direct thermal ticket printers on the market today.

Direct thermal technology eliminates the need for ink, toner and ribbon required by most other printing mechanisms. By using Boca’s Friendly Ghost Language (FGL) or optional Windows® emulation, you can literally design and print your own tickets and labels within minutes and achieve an industry leading 14 inches per second (200 dpi, high speed configuration) maximum print speed. The printers also support high-resolution graphics and a variety of industry standard bar codes.

The printers come with support for a variety of interfaces including serial, parallel, Ethernet and USB.  For software solution, Boca provides a USB Communications Dynamic Link Library which is used internally in factory configuration software and externally by customers seeking to develop ticketing applications. Boca provides two sample applications that interface with this DLL: An application that provides end users with a GUI tool for printers configuration and a test program utility.

For its USB driver needs, Boca selected WinDriver USB for Windows as “the WinDriver implementation was focused around our two most important requirements which were bi-directional communication speed and simplicity of use to our customers” says Michael Hall, Boca Systems R&D developer. “The obvious alternative would have been to develop the low level drivers ourselves. However, as I have done this in the past and know how time consuming it is, I chose the WinDriver solution. There are also many USB standards to follow that Jungo has already taken into account, and by using WinDriver I was able to take advantage of these features and use the supplied sample code demonstrating the use of WinDriver APIs to obtain quick results.“

WinDriver routine calls are all embedded within the Boca Systems DLL wrapped with Visual C as designed and developed by Boca Systems.  The DLL can be built with either Visual Basic or Visual C applications providing the developer with USB bi-directional communication. This DLL provides multiple entry points with VB & VC function calls. Among the APIs provided are the functions Initialize_USB(),  which establishes the communication, Find_Printers (), which scans the USB ports and hubs for Boca USB printers and populates a table showing all the Boca USB printers found, and, Open_USB () , which opens communication pipes to a Boca Systems printer. For reading and writing data the DLL provides Read_USB() and Write_USB() functions which are used to read and write to and from the Boca USB printer buffers.

The WinDriver architecture and implementation eliminate the need for Boca Systems' customers to understand some of the inner workings of the printer hardware and bi-directional USB protocol communication mechanisms. Boca's customers can utilize the DLL to develop their ticketing software by interfacing with the intuitive API provided. Users can also take advantage of the bi-directional communication that is made possible through the use of the WinDriver APIs. The WinDriver based DLL also allows the user to exclusively poll the USB interface directly for status before any data is sent to the printer. This can insure that valuable data is not lost when it is being transferred to a printer that is not ready for printing.







Company Contact Details:
Boca Systems, INC
1065 South Rogers Circle,
Boca Raton, Florida 33487
Email: boca@bocasystems.com
Website: www.bocasystems.com

Jungo Sales Department:
Phone: 1-877-514-0537 (USA) or +972-74-721-2223 (Worldwide)
Fax: 972-74-721-2122
Email: sales@jungo.com