HP82164A HP-IL/RS-232C interface

[dinamarco]

I'm trying to connect a printer like EPSON LX80 or FX80 on my HP-41CX using these PAC, is possible? How about the cable?

[Eric Smith]

If you have the serial version of the printer (relatively uncommon), that should work. You'll also need the HP 82160A HP-IL interface for the 41, two HP-IL cables, and a serial cable.

Most LX80 and FX80 printers have a Centronics-style parallel interface using a 36-pin connector.

41C programs expecting to work with an 82143A or 82162A printer may not work correctly with the FX80 or LX80, depending on what printer features they use.

[Andrés C. Rodríguez (Argentina)]

IIRC, Epson used to sell a (rather expensive) "serial interface board" as an user installable option. It presented a DB-25 RS-232 connector to the outside, and plugged as a daughterboard in the printer's logic board. The funny thing was that the board did little more than translation of the +/-12 V signals from the RS-232 interface into 0-5V TTL-compatible levels. The serial functionality was already on the logic board of every printer!

In 1986, I managed a project related to this feature, and we developed a very simple interface (using TTL levels) to connect such printers to a 8088-controlled graphics terminal (NAPLPS). The hardware was little more than connectors and pull-up resistors; the fun went into developing the graphics screen-dump software!

[I apologize in advance for idiomatic mistakes and possible minutia, since this comment is based just in my memories of that time, without any documentation at hand to check for details.]

[dinamarco]

ok... if you like to help me... No problems if you want to write me in spanish. Best Regards... Saludos!

[Andrés C. Rodríguez (Argentina)]

My little contribution is just to suggest that, even if you have the typical, paralell-interface model; explore on the inside to see if serial functionality is there, almost for free. If you need to translate RS-232 levels, a Maxim integrated circuit does it easily in current times, avoiding the 1488/1489 or 75150/75154 old-time buffers (old and also failure prone). I cannot help on the HP-IL side, I have no experience with it.
Best regards.

[Tony Duell]

From what I remember, Epson made at least 3 diffferent RS232 interfaces for the MX/RX/etc printers. As you said, the standard printer firmware included a (bit-banged, IIRC) serial interface, and the simplest RS232 board enabled this (IIRC by grounding a pin on the conenctor for the interface PCB) and converted between RS232 levels and TTL. Configuration (baud rate, etc) was done by DIP switches on the board, read via the (redundant) parallel input port.

The other 2 RS232 boards had microcontrollers and buffer RAM on them and did a full serial-parallel conversion. The printer was left as a normal parallel device.

Epson also made an HPIB/GPIB/IEEE488 interface. It does the address comparison, handshake, etc and just feeds the data to the printer as a parallel device.

Those are not easy to find, but much harder to find still is the HP HPIL interface board. It was part of the HP82905 printer, but it will work in many older Epsons. IIRC, it's a microcontroller and a 1LB3, basically.

[dinamarco]

ok... I'll try to find these other module. Regards... andThank you for help-me.