Flight Progress Strip Printers
 

Hi

Looking for information about Flight Progress Strip Printers, specifically the makes and models of the printers used and the size of strip produced.

Does anyone know of a strip printer that can print off to the standard 25mm x 200mm VFR strip size?

I have found BOCA as being one manufacturer - any others? Does anyone know of a source of second hand strip printers?

Finally, does anyone have any experience of printing to such printers from anything other than specifically developed air traffic applications?

Many thanks in advance.

I've often wondered why controllers have very small handwriting.

We use an IER512

Apologies - I meant 25mm. Thanks

Matspart3 - Do you use a specific ATC application to drive the printer or something generic?

Copperchase's FDMS.

I'm pretty sure the Copperchase system has FPS printing built in unless its a very old version.

I can't remember what our printer is (I'll have a look next time I'm in). It is a thermal printer and prints onto a roll of about 450 strips, our pre-requisite for strip printing was that each printed strip is MATS Part 1 standard in terms of layout and content (with some slight local variations) although the printer prints in black on white paper and is then put into a coloured strip holders.

The strips are a standard size and fits holders 10ACA275348.

The biggest hurdle for us was sourcing the paper.

I think Resource Training use a basic 'home made' programme for strip printing with a strip printer, you could see if their setup suits you.

Thanks Andy, if you could find the printer make that would be great.

The background to this is that a colleague has put a lot of work in to creating an Excel spreadsheet that will print on to the standard strips in the correct format. This system has a user friendly front end to allow either us (we are a FISO unit), to 'quick select' the aircraft required (we are also looking at touch screen monitors to improve this aspect), or for pilots to 'book out' in the Flight Briefing room before flight.
We have the basics working well and currently use the system on a pilot basis (excuse the pun!), for our reception staff to enter PPR details. Currently the print out goes to a standard Laserjet loaded with pre perforated A4, which we then tear off and load in to the correct coloured strip holder. The issue with this is that the printer is too big to fit on the VCR desk and so is at the back of the room and,when busy, we can't keep getting up to collect and tear off strips.
What we'd really like is for a proper thermal printer running off Windows to just churn out the strips on the desk. None of the generic thermal printers (Dymo, Epson etc), seem to support the size of strips.
It's been suggested that hospital wristbands are of the same width, so that's another option we're perusing.

Very limited budget for this project, so appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks

We discovered pretty early that there are no printers solely for ATC strips (not 8 years ago anyway) and that the ones used in ATC are actually designed primarily for "Airport Baggage Handling Agents" so you might have some luck googling for that purpose.

Have you seen this site: Flightstrips, Flight Progress Strip Holders, Flightstrip Papers

Used to work for a company developing ATC systems. As stated before, the only provider that we used was IER. Coincidentaly there is one of their printers (non-functional) on ebay!

IER-512-Thermal-baggage-tag-flight-strip-printer

These are very simple printers that are controlled using ascii characters and control sequences, so basically all you require to do is create a text file or text string and send it to the printer via a COM port. There may be a driver for Windows but we never hosted on it, so don't know!

Internally the printer is very 'heath-robinson' - there are guides that you can set for your selected strip width. Considering the size of the printer casing, there is very little inside, however they are built to last so are quiet heavy! From memory I would estimate the size as 22cm w x 22cm h x 45cm d.

Depending on our customers' choice we used roll or fan-fold strips. There is a cutter mechanism to use with roll feed and IIRC a sensor to detect strip start on fan-fold.

Squadgy,

The printer we have looks to be exactly the one in the eBay link posted above.

We use rolls of strips and each strip is perforated.

Have you considered thermal EPOS receipt printers? These are quite compact and available with cutters. Being a thermal printer it is not a problem if the strip does not cover the whole print area - so a guide could be made to ensure correct alignment (approx 80mm -> 25mm).

Your only problems then would be - is the thermal head man enough to 'burn' flight strip paper, will the cutter be able to cut it and can you drive it easily :eek:

Thanks guys. I had seen the printer on Ebay and asked the vendor why it's u/s.

Also been in contact with a contact in NATS who has the BOCA Lemur (expensive!), and the Citizen CL-S521.

Hopefully we will find a solution soon :-)

We have IER thermal printers that feed a continuous roll and cut it to size. These are driven by Copperchase FDMS but that's built on Windows so you may have a cheap-ish solution with your ebay link if you can get it working.

The memory is a bit hazy - going back over a decade! but, IIRC the print functionality of any single IER 512 is configured by an EPROM.

So, if in it's previous life it was a baggage tag printer, in all probability you will need to change the EPROM to print flight strips. Also I don't think all variants had cutters fitted. You may need to ask more questions!

Spares shouldn't be a problem if you have facilities to repair electronic/mechanical devices - getting a particular flight strip EPROM may be! :hmm:

I think with a little programming you should be able to do it all with this -

Zebra Technologies LP2824 Plus

I don't know how we managed before without Google!

All this for Barton AFIS?
Stick to manual. Much more reliable.
Or revert to A/G...

Sorry if I am being a bit too enthusiastic but when your at home ...

Having perused the net a bit more it seems that you should be able to print directly from excel to the Zebra Technologies LP2824 Plus using the supplied drivers.

Using your current formatting you should only need to setup the print media and mapping appropriately.

I would suggest that you try installing the printer drivers and generate a print preview!

LP-2824-drivers

If you do decide to try please report how you get on.

I've worked with the BOCA flight strip printer (bocasystems.com), which is the printer used in the FAA in the U.S.. It plugs into USB and shows up in Windows as a regular printer. You can print to it from any app, including Word. It treats the strips like a really wide and short piece of paper. Or for special functionality like changing fonts or drawing lines, it has a command set you put in brackets within the string you're printing. I found it very easy to use. It's about $2,500 U.S. though. They also sell strips, and will sell in single quantities.

Loads of great suggestions here, thanks.

Control Eng, the LP2824 seems to be the best solution, and your idea of downloading the drivers and running a print preview before we buy a device is great - will try this out and let you knkw the outcome. Thanks again! :)

I just had a go at downloading the drivers and having a play as Control Eng suggested.

Although not having the actual device connected limits investigations slightly, but with the use of Print Preview, it certainly seems like this is probably an efficient achievable way to enable FPS printing, especially if you can get your Excel spreadsheet to be very user friendly.

It would be useful if you could link up your "Obtain PPR" page from your website to automatically print a FPS when someone sends their completed PPR request!

Let us know how you get on at Barton.

I suspect Control Eng has lost some Aviation Software Developers some income world wide!:D:D Well done!

Thanks Andy - sounds great.

Will consider how to achieve the link up to the online PPR page on our website. Some kind of auto import to Excel and a macro to trigger the print command should do the trick, but we need to get the basics first :-)

Will let you know!

Squadgy - a few points

on investigation I have found that not all LP2824's have cutters - the one I originally linked to did not. I have changed the link to one that does - slightly more expensive.

You are probably going to have difficulty sourcing correct diameter rolls of flight strip paper. I haven't been able to locate any on-line (although I have found tens of RFQ's from various aviation authorities)!

Be aware that some coated direct thermal paper is not easy to write on with ball-point pens. I would recommend that when you find a source, that you request some samples to test.

You could maybe get away with buying larger rolls (from the site posted previously) and rewinding onto different spools. If you use an approx 50mm dia spool you should get about 150m of strip on it ~ 750 strips, however I expect that when you get to the end of a roll there will be significant 'curl'.

I have installed the Zebra driver. The preview from excel shows exactly what appears on the screen. I have sent the print stream to a file - the contents of the file is what Zebra call ZLP script. From the generated script I can see that the driver rasterises the print area into a bitmap image, which it sends to the printer to print.

However what is quite interesting is how simple the ZLP script language is - it is basically a series of ascii strings specifying where to position an element eg: line, text string etc.

These strings -

produces a 25mm x 200mm print out that looks like this -

http://s16.postimg.org/aixnj602t/FS_example.png

It would be very simple to write a VB script to generate the strings and may be more convenient than using excel.

Please post your progress! :ok:

Control Eng - many thanks for your ongoing support and suggestions.

Yesterday we downloaded the Zebra LP2824 printer drivers and succesfully obtained a print preview in the correct format from Excel :ok:

We have been through the printer manual and found that as well as rolled paper the LP2824 can also accept a feed of 'Fan Fold' strip paper, as advertised on this site : Thermal Printer Paper, Flightstrip Papers, Paper Rolls, Fanfolded Thermal Paper - This would be preferable in any case as the Fan Fold paper allows for multiple strips to be printed and then torn off my hand at the fold, without the need for a cutter on the printer. We have requested a quote for this paper.

Will keep you updated on further progress !

Squadgy

For fan-fold the printer obviously has to 'index' with the print media. In the IER512 this is achieved using a black line at one edge of the media, situated some distance from the perforations.

On the older versions of the printer if the media was loaded incorrectly the printer would continually feed! - it did show how athletic controllers could be trying to hit the stop button.

Looking at the LP2824 specifications, it appears to have two indexing options - either a black line across the back of the media at the perforations (mark), or an optical sensor that identifies a difference in the surface reflectivity (web). It has however been designed with better safety features - it stops feeding after a maximum of 39 inches if it does not identify an index!

I do not think that the change in reflectivity at the perforations will be sufficient to trigger the web sensor, so I think you will need to rely on the black line mark method.

I suspect that the fan-fold media you have identified is probably marked for IER512 printers, so you may have a problem.

I recommend you ask or get a sample to check how it is marked and also check with a Zebra distributor.

Thanks for the ongoing info!

By way of an update, we sourced 800 example thermal fanfold strips last week, which have now been delivered. The Zebra printer is on order and set for delivery next week.

Will report back, hopefully by the end of next week.

Good progress made today. The LP2824 printer arrived, and after some initial teething issues we were able to print straight off from our Excel system on to the fanfold strips.

Control Eng, the issue with indexing the strip in to the printer is as you expected. The black mark on the strip is on the wrong side of the strip for the sensor on the printer, and therefore the printer does not know where to start printing, this means that sometimes the prints are a few mm out, and if not corrected eventually overlapping would occur. We have tried drawing marks on the correct side of the strip to try things out - but this does not seem to work when calibration is set up.

However, I think having had a play that the indexing/ calibration is not something to worry about. We could just get a roll of continuous 25mm wide thermal paper produced (we have a company that have said that they can do this for us relatively cheaply), with no perforations. As the print driver defines the length of the paper to print each strip on we can just rip each strip off using the serrated edge of the printer, and the indexing is therefore not an issue, (it would have been even better if we had purchased the printer with the cutter, and then it would have sliced each strip off after printing).

Given we only got this running a few hours ago, I'm pretty happy with where we're at now and will look to progress further over the next few days.

:)

I developed a system (a long time ago) to print flight progress strips onto ordinary roll paper.

The printer used was a very common dot matrix printer fitted with a paper cutter. The software printed the strip, the paper was advanced and the cutter actuated to slice off the strip. It worked very well but unfortunately we never sold any (I guess it was not expensive enough!).

You've done very well. The coated paper/card stock we use doesn't tear very nicely, so it might be worth investigating other options. One of these might work 3M paper cutter, very cheap and the result will be neat. You might need a sharps permit if you're airside though :}

Fps printers
 

I recently made up a strip printer for where I work using vba coding through Microsoft access. I used some zebra printers and use bog standard 1x7" thermal strips.

The strips come out perfectly.

If you need any help please let me know

DCS

This afternoon we set up the printer in the tower and got it fully working.

Here's a video showing the flight details being entered in to the Excel system and the print out to the printer.



Initially we plan to trial this with PPR requests via phone (Inbounds and Outbounds calling up on RT will still be written by hand).

It should be noted that whilst the flight details are being entered in the VCR in this video, the reception staff have a similar Excel system and can also key in the details when they take PPR requests by phone - these print out in the VCR and should therefore reduce the need for phone calls to the FISOs thereby reducing distraction.

In time we may introduce the ability for pilots to 'book out' using this system, rather than a paper based record as is used now. The system already keeps an archive of all strips generated.

A further future development may be to couple this up to the online PPR form on our website, such that when someone fills in their details a strip will be produced. That needs some interaction between Outlook and Excel though and so needs some further research !

Thanks again for everyone's help !:ok:

How can FISOs have a VCR?

Ok TDM

A VIR, or maybe just a VR ?? ! :8 ;)

We refer to ours as 'the tower'.

Do you have a washing machine in the VIR (otherwise known as a VCR to everyone other than TDM!:E)? Whatever that is in the background at the start of the video sounds just like my washing machine on a slow cycle!

I admire the effort that has gone into this. Those posting that it's a waste of time forget that this is someones interest, hobby and professional development. It certainly looks smart and I wouldn't be surprised if a few visitors ask for their progress strips afterwards, would be ideal little momento to go with trial flight certificates.
Really professional, very impressive.

Thanks for all the comments. Several FISOs were involved in developing this, I just started looking at it when we were sourcing and setting up the printer.

The idea of presenting people with the strip - this is something we already do this with the hand written ones for student first solo flights (the airfield presents a certificate regardless of the school they are learning with), mounted together with the certificate.

We think we may print on a (duplicate) strip something like 'Congratulations on your First Solo!'

Squadgy - sorry I haven't had a chance to catchup with the forum for a few days. Nice to see you have positive results.

I don't know if you want to try a few more things with the fan-fold, but here are a few more ideas I have had (these are of course all theoretical as I don't have a printer to verify!)

I have looked at some Zebra service manuals, but not LP2824 (couldn't find one). In all the ones I have seen, the mark/web sensor is located in the exact centre of the print mechanism after the print head. This would probably prevent it from identifying a mark near the edge of the media (in fact some of the user guides state something like this in relation to the mark (not web) sensor). Also, thinking logically, in the Zebra any index mark must be on the leading part of the media to prevent mis-identifying anything printed as an index.

I am assuming that the large black mark on the lower trailing edge of the printed strip is the pre-printed index (the IER512 sensor is located before the print head).

I think you may be able to identify this mark by printing with the strip loaded in the opposite direction, however you will need to use a few other tricks!

Is it possible to set up the guides so the strip is offset, and the mark passes under the centre of the print mechanism?

You will need to select 'web sensing' in the printer set up to use the upper sensor. You will also have to increase the (theoretical)media width to compensate for the offset, and use the page margins to set the print position appropriately.

If it does identify the mark you will probably also need to use the backfeed setting to move the strip back a fraction before printing.

Control Eng. With apologies for the delay responding :

We've decided not to progress the sensor investigations as we're very content with how things are running now with the Fan Fold, and we have now worked out that there is enough 'give' on the roller to tear off consistently, so we always start at the same place.

However, we are also looking at rolls of paper and we are to trial that too. It may be that we need to look at a printer with a cutter. The rolls of paper are far cheaper (Approx £0.02, compared to £0.07 for fan fold). Given we probably use around 50,000 strips per year its worth looking at.

I'm also trying to progess the ideas of PPRs that come from our website being auto printed. The website generates an email which flows to an Outlook email client, so I am looking at a macro to pull the data from there and output to the strip printer with no mannual intervention - still working on that !!

Thanks again

IERC flight strip printer
 

We have some IER512C flight strip printers. We need to change the baud rate and parity on the printers. Any one have the level 2 Password of the printer that we can go in and change these settings?