Moving to Ubuntu at work

RichP

RichP

NAXJA Forum User
Location
Effort, Pa
Got a new building going up, we are writing our own POS with 17 inch touch screens, cash drawers and receipt printers for the store/bar/restaurant/smoking lounge. I'll be doing nine of them and may actually be using them later on in the 18 packing stations back in the warehouse with hand scanners instead of printers.
I'm looking at some of the atom boxes from Acer and Asus. Anybody done any installs on these small boxes that will actually hang on back of a monitor. The already done POS are just too darn much money, I'm not spending $3K for each station, no way.
Looking at ubuntu and the locked down kiosk option which I like if I can get it to emulate a scoansi.
 
RichP said:
I'm looking at some of the atom boxes from Acer and Asus. Anybody done any installs on these small boxes that will actually hang on back of a monitor. The already done POS are just too darn much money, I'm not spending $3K for each station, no way.
Looking at ubuntu and the locked down kiosk option which I like if I can get it to emulate a scoansi.
Click to expand...

You should be fine with that setup. I haven't specifically done POS installs on them, but for something that low-demand I can't really see it being an issue other than making sure they have enough ports to accept whatever devices are hanging off of them. At a rough guess, I'd assume it would mean (possibly) a keyboard, the touchscreen, a credit card reader, and a receipt printer.

My only major question would be what the state of play is for Linux software that can handle credit card readers - I'd imagine that the reader itself would use some form of serial or USB connector for physically attaching to the machine, but I'm in the dark when it comes to how that would be handled on the software side. This link has some ideas on that, though.
 
casm said:
You should be fine with that setup. I haven't specifically done POS installs on them, but for something that low-demand I can't really see it being an issue other than making sure they have enough ports to accept whatever devices are hanging off of them. At a rough guess, I'd assume it would mean (possibly) a keyboard, the touchscreen, a credit card reader, and a receipt printer.

My only major question would be what the state of play is for Linux software that can handle credit card readers - I'd imagine that the reader itself would use some form of serial or USB connector for physically attaching to the machine, but I'm in the dark when it comes to how that would be handled on the software side. This link has some ideas on that, though.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that link, I just got a thumbs up from one of our developers.
 
casm said:
You should be fine with that setup. I haven't specifically done POS installs on them, but for something that low-demand I can't really see it being an issue other than making sure they have enough ports to accept whatever devices are hanging off of them. At a rough guess, I'd assume it would mean (possibly) a keyboard, the touchscreen, a credit card reader, and a receipt printer.

My only major question would be what the state of play is for Linux software that can handle credit card readers - I'd imagine that the reader itself would use some form of serial or USB connector for physically attaching to the machine, but I'm in the dark when it comes to how that would be handled on the software side. This link has some ideas on that, though.
Click to expand...

ahhh yes, card readers.

The mag swipe readers just input text to the machine like you typed it on a keyboard, with spaces in between te card data. You just write the software to fill out the fields in the POS based on the spaces for the number/name.

Now, processing is a different story, i've not tried processing directly out of linux, but I have done POS systms that went to a PC Charge server. Basically your POS just dumps the card info into the server and it runs the card, then responds back to the POS. It's all gotten trickier since the new laws went into effect regarding credit card processing security.

I would look into PC-Charge, it's relatively cheap, and you could just rock another Atom box as a card processing machine with Win XP on it.

FWIW we've been using Dual core Atom D52 boards for entry level office workstations, they're fantastic. Low power, low noise, pretty bulletproof. More than enough power to handle Linux and basic office needs. The video section sucks, so no HD video decoding, but for what you want to do they are ideal.

Thes epeople
http://www.usaepay.com/content/epaycharge.htm

have written card processing in Java and support Linux.
 
87manche said:
ahhh yes, card readers.

The mag swipe readers just input text to the machine like you typed it on a keyboard, with spaces in between te card data. You just write the software to fill out the fields in the POS based on the spaces for the number/name.

Now, processing is a different story, i've not tried processing directly out of linux, but I have done POS systms that went to a PC Charge server. Basically your POS just dumps the card info into the server and it runs the card, then responds back to the POS. It's all gotten trickier since the new laws went into effect regarding credit card processing security.

I would look into PC-Charge, it's relatively cheap, and you could just rock another Atom box as a card processing machine with Win XP on it.

FWIW we've been using Dual core Atom D52 boards for entry level office workstations, they're fantastic. Low power, low noise, pretty bulletproof. More than enough power to handle Linux and basic office needs. The video section sucks, so no HD video decoding, but for what you want to do they are ideal.

Thes epeople
http://www.usaepay.com/content/epaycharge.htm

have written card processing in Java and support Linux.
Click to expand...

I'm looking and hunting printers now, probably thermal that need usb to the box and one of those RJ11 dealies to open the cash drawer which I have now with my Ithaca impact printers.
 
opening the cash drawers is no problem. You just use a serial port and go high or low on one of the signal pins, depending on what your drawers want.

Of course you could do the same thing USB.

Zebra makes decent thermal printers. Epson as well. Zebra even makes some truely networked ones with internal print servers. Something to look at if you want multiple POS terminals to print to a common receipt printer on the counter.
 
87manche said:
opening the cash drawers is no problem. You just use a serial port and go high or low on one of the signal pins, depending on what your drawers want.

Of course you could do the same thing USB.

Zebra makes decent thermal printers. Epson as well. Zebra even makes some truely networked ones with internal print servers. Something to look at if you want multiple POS terminals to print to a common receipt printer on the counter.
Click to expand...

We have a bunch of zebra printers in the warehouse, big ones that print the shipping labels. Not sure how many printers yet, still hashing that out, still hashing out thermal one page vs impact two page. I like the thermals because they can print coupons on the back side, I think, if I read the description right.
 
RichP said:
We have a bunch of zebra printers in the warehouse, big ones that print the shipping labels. Not sure how many printers yet, still hashing that out, still hashing out thermal one page vs impact two page. I like the thermals because they can print coupons on the back side, I think, if I read the description right.
Click to expand...

yeah, some can, some even give you the option of two or three colors.

Small dot matrix printers are basically non existent anymore. They just can't touch a thermal for speed. Unfortunately the thermal printers cost a fortune to run compared to the old pin printers.
Epson may still make a small dot matrix receipt printer.

I know they exited the regular dot matrix page printer market a long time ago. The only company left doing that is OKi, and good lord they're expensive.

I'll be damned, epson still makes it:
http://www.posworld.com/epson-tm-u220d-receipt-printer.html

I think Star makes a dot matrix as well. I guess you'll have to determine cost per receipt vs the features you want.
 
87manche said:
yeah, some can, some even give you the option of two or three colors.

Small dot matrix printers are basically non existent anymore. They just can't touch a thermal for speed. Unfortunately the thermal printers cost a fortune to run compared to the old pin printers.
Epson may still make a small dot matrix receipt printer.

I know they exited the regular dot matrix page printer market a long time ago. The only company left doing that is OKi, and good lord they're expensive.

I'll be damned, epson still makes it:
http://www.posworld.com/epson-tm-u220d-receipt-printer.html

I think Star makes a dot matrix as well. I guess you'll have to determine cost per receipt vs the features you want.
Click to expand...

Who took over Ithaca ?
 
Thermal also has the benefit/downside of self-erasing receipts. But at least you can use them as notepaper by writing with your thumbnail if you don't have a pen handy.
 
87manche said:
The mag swipe readers just input text to the machine like you typed it on a keyboard, with spaces in between te card data. You just write the software to fill out the fields in the POS based on the spaces for the number/name.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's how I remember it being as well. Back in about 1999 I was a QA Engineer at a company that was heavily involved in OS development for Internet Appliances; one of our clients was looking to implement a consumer-level swipe system for online credit card transactions on our platform. It was actually pretty slick - all the swipe data was encrypted in hardware on the reader, then sent off to them for the actual processing of the transaction.

The downside to it (other than the projected $249 cost to the end user) ended up being that it turned out to be trivial to tap the mainboard ahead of their whizzbang crypto IC and get the raw serial data from the card swipe. That, SSL requiring substantially less overhead as CPU speeds improved, and the fact that whoever designed their hardware never accommodated the ability to change the PSKs on the reader kinda put a damper on their plans.
 
I wish I worked for a smaller company with more say in such matters. I'm a molecule in the grand scheme of things at my corp. My job is--here, work with this and deal with it and don't deviate and you have no choice in anything, lol.
 
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