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I have an Openbravo POS workstation with a customer display pole. The pole is VFD-860. When I click on the products on the Sales page of Openbravo, the display responds but displays garbage: enter image description here

When I turn the pole off and then on. I get this: enter image description here

So it is not exactly broken. Com port is correct because otherwise it would not respond at all.

There is a configuration utility with the pole but it is either the wrong version (it says it's for VFD660_460 but the documentation at http://bit.ly/iUbmpB says that VFD860 uses software which installs itself to Start menu > Programs > VFD-660_460) or there is some other problem because whatever choice I make there, after clicking Accept I always get Device Time Out error (even though I see another garbage character appearing onto the display the second I click Accept).

How to fix that?

stukelly
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Henno
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  • How about contacting the vendor? – DanBig May 03 '11 at 13:27
  • Have you tried using Telnet to test the display is working. – stukelly May 03 '11 at 13:28
  • @DanBig. Email is sent. Waiting for reply. – Henno May 03 '11 at 13:32
  • @stukelly, Yes. Telnet does the same thing. – Henno May 03 '11 at 13:35
  • A different COM port also does the same thing (if I choose that other port from the settings) – Henno May 03 '11 at 13:41
  • Are you sure the serial port is also set to 9600,O,8,1? Odd parity is unusual. Are you sure the pole is supposed to be set to 9600,O,8,1? Again, odd parity is *very* unusual and a parity mismatch could cause this kind of problem. – David Schwartz Mar 31 '12 at 08:16
  • David, you are right. The issue *was* caused by a parity mismatch. I had to change the parity in Windows to match the pole's current setting and then I was able to successfully reprogram the pole. – Henno Mar 31 '12 at 15:58

1 Answers1

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Did you contact the vendor? It sounds like there is some kind of COM port issue, but really this is so specialized that your first point of contact would be your vendor's support line. I'm assuming you paid for the equipment, you should get some form of support.

Bart Silverstrim
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  • I tried phoning but could not reach. I will try to email them. – Henno May 03 '11 at 13:29
  • I sent an email to manufacturer. Waiting for a reply.. – Henno May 05 '11 at 13:10
  • After exchanging some emails with customer support I was successful and managed to get the customer display pole working. A first few attempts resulted in com port error but I think that by specifying the same settings in the Device Manager that I saw displayed on the pole itself, I was able to successfully reprogram the pole. Then I changed Windows port settings back to defaults and now it works. – Henno Mar 31 '12 at 15:56