Printing

I’m wondering how to print out a supertrend,

I need to have a Printout from each batch that goes through the oven, I have a supertrend on my main screen that records the time and temperature.
the paint will bake about 40 minutes, once the 40 min are up the paint is cured, and I like the software to do a printout for that batch the time it has run and the temperature,

these are the steps:
1 Enter a Serial Number of the batch
2 Press Cure
3 Cure for 40 min or (xx amount of minutes)
4 Cure Complete
5 Print Serial Number with Supertrend, or Seiral Number + Time and temperature information

is it possible to do it?

Thanks
David.

Hi David,

Of course, like may things in PAC Project, you could approach this a number of ways. Are you saying you’re looking for some way to do this automatically? Because that might be a bit tricky. Also, do you really need a hard-copy, or perhaps another format might be more helpful? In any case, here are a few discussions you might want to check out that could give you some ideas:

[INDENT]Printing from within PAC Display

Parsing a SuperTrend file

Viewing a SuperTrend after the fact
[/INDENT]I hope that helps!
-OptoMary

for not it will be a hard copy but in near future we might look into saving it on a server, and if possible I like to do it automatically, but for not if I can get it to print it will be a great start. thanks

Hi David

CutePDF writer is a great tool to print your pac display windows to a pdf. this will make it easy to save on your server when you get it happening.

Also for doing things automatically, there is a program called AutoHotKey (i reckon Ben has mentioned this before in the forums). its a macro program that will ‘record’ actions (keystrokes and mouse moves) and reproduce those actions when a certain key is pressed. its a great little program and we have been using it for about 5 years to do things in Opto 22 PAC Project (one really big job was to resize 1200+ pac display windows and move some objects around, with autohotkey it took about a day!!).

if you can ‘record’ a macro to open a PAC Display window, click ‘File’ then ‘Print’, you could use a variable from your controller to trigger an application in PAC Display. Sounds heavy, but once you get the hang of AutoHotKey you’ll never look back.

I hope this helps

Nick

ok thanks for all the help,
but now an other problem happens when I click print.
I have a window with a button with the (Operator driven attributes Execute Menu Item>File/Print) the print dialog will open but when I hit print on the print dialog PAC display stops responding and will close any reason for it; is it because I’m still running it in SIM mode?

Hi David,

Not sure what you mean by “running it in SIM mode.” Are we talking about PAC Display here? Or perhaps you’re using SNAP PAC Sim for your control engine?

Don’t forget, you can always contact our PSG (product support group).
http://www.opto22.com/site/support.aspx
It’s FREE!

-OptoMary

yes I’m talking about the snap pac sim and it is PAC Display, I have not recived my controller yet, it’s ordered from opto22 distributer so now I just keep using the Snap Pac Sim as my controller,

Hi David,

Shouldn’t matter what controller you’re using. In fact, you don’t even need a controller at all to test that (I just built a project with just a button like the one you describe, and it’s working okay for me).

The window that pops up where you select the printer is actually a standard windows dialog (not exactly part of PAC Display):

Do you have more than one printer you try to see if it makes a difference?

I looked through our KB articles and see a couple issues have been corrected lately related to printing, for example PAC Display version R9.1c includes a fix for KB81382 which might be relevant. But I’d strongly suggest you contact product support so they can help troubleshoot and identify any upgrades that might be helpful to you.

-OptoMary