MagTek IntelliStripe65 99875161 - Manual (Page 79)

Section 9. Host Communications Application
73
MCP Protocol:
This binary protocol is described in MagTek’s MCP Serial Transport Protocol reference manual,
part number 99875163. This is the default protocol used by this device. MagTek’s MCP
Windows Driver for the RS232 and USB interfaces uses this protocol. This protocol is rather
complicated, however, it can be extremely simplified by adjusting some of the other properties
found in this application such as the Error Recovery Enable property.
ASCII Hex Protocol:
This is a very simple ASCII based protocol. This protocol is very simple to implement. For the
RS232 interface, a terminal emulation application such as Window’s HyperTerminal can be used
to communicate to the device using this protocol. USB drivers can be designed to use this
protocol if they follow the pipe structure described in the USB section of MagTek’s MCP Serial
Transport Protocol reference manual, part number 99875163. Since this is an ASCII based
protocol used to send Binary data, it is twice as slow as the binary MCP protocol because it
requires twice as many bytes to be sent.
Only the following ASCII characters are valid for this protocol. All other characters will be
ignored by the device.
Value (Hex) Code/Char
0D Carriage Return <CR>
18 Cancel <CAN>
30-39 1-9
41-46 A-F
a-f a-f
Command requests should be sent to the device as they are defined in this manual followed by a
carriage return. Each binary byte should be sent as two ASCII hex characters. For example, the
binary byte 5A (hex) should be sent as the two ASCII characters 5 (35 hex) and A (41 hex). The
device will send Command responses and notification messages to the host as they are defined in
this manual followed by a carriage return. The device will only send upper case letters A thru F.
The host is free to also send lower case a thru f in addition to upper case A thru F.
The device is also free to send the cancel character (18 hex) at anytime to cancel anything that
may be in the devices receive buffer prior to sending the carriage return. However, this cannot
be used to cancel a command that is in progress. The host should wait at least 50ms before
sending anything else to the device after sending this cancel character. The device will not
respond to the cancel character. The cancel character could be useful when the host application
first starts or after a communications error occurs to make sure that the device is in a known
state.
If the device is using the ASCII protocol, the host would send the following sequence of bytes
(in hex) to send the following example requrest:
30 30 30 38 30 31 30 30 30 31 30 38 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 30 0D