I wrote about building an Ecometry Shipping Station on your own over a year ago. A few people have tried building one on their own using this guide, which is great. So I decided when I was going to build two more when we integrated UPS and were given some new Dell computers as part of a UPS subsidy (which was really cool), that I should share my experience again.
Everything worked pretty straightforward like last time, save for that the new computers don’t have PS2 ports, just USB. So our older scanners no longer work with new hardware. The configuration is as follows:
- Dell Optiplex 740 Desktop
- Zebra S4M Direct Thermal Printer
- Mettler Toledo PS60 Scale
- Symbol LS2208 Barcode Scanner
I still had to change the settings on the COM1 port to work with the scale. The settings can be found in my original post here. I also had to set the scale’s protocol to Mettler Toledo, which you can easily do following the instructions that come on the CD with the scale. Thanks to Chuck on the Ecometry Google Group for that tip. You’ll also want to be sure the baud rate and stop bits settings on the scale match up with what you set on the COM port.
The Zebra S4M printer will work just fine with UPS provided labels. If you don’t have those, get direct thermal labels. You don’t need a ribbon (and the printer isn’t configured for one from UPS anyway). Ecometry will tell you that all that works is the Z4M printers, but the S4M printer will work just fine. This is great because it costs about half as much as a Z4M.
And remember, there are no PS2 ports on these newer computer so there’s no support for older scanners, such as the PSC Powerscan PSSR-0000 or PSSR-1000. These just aren’t compatible with USB. You could perhaps get this to work with a PCI add in card such as this one and some AT to PS2 converters, but I didn’t want to spend a bunch of extra money to just hack the thing together. It seemed to be a better idea to just get all new hardware for these.
We’ve been using these new stations for a few days now and they’re working great. Feel free to drop me a line about building these. You can definitely save yourself a bunch of money building these on your own instead of going through Ecometry’s provider, Agilysys.
Hi Bill, great article we are also in the process of building a new shipping station with pretty much the exact specs you got listed above…except our scale is a Large Mettler Toledo Panther scale. Would the com settings be the same for that as well? Also you mentioned a CD with setup instructions. Where can we find this CD that we are missing?
Thanks,
David
David,
I’m not familiar with that Mettler model scale, but we do have an older large scale and I -believe- the COM settings are a little different. If you’d like, I could go verify for you. There was a CD and manual that came with our two new scales. I’d assume that Mettler ships all their scales with similar documentation.
-Bill
That would be great if you could verify them for me.
Thanks,
David
Ok, ours is set up on COM3 as a LARGE scale (the setting in VisualLink). As for the COM port settings themselves:
Bits per second: 9600
Data bits: 7
Parity: Even
Stop bits: 2
Flow Control: Xon/Xoff
As long as the settings on the scale match up with that, I’d think that it would work ok.
Hello. I’m pretty new to Ecometry, I just started a new IT career with a company that uses the program. Currently we have 10 Ecometry shipping stations running Agilsys built Windows 98 machines, with Mettler Toledo ID1 Plus scales and Symbol serial scanners. I’m trying to build a shipping station using an old PII Compaq PC with Windows XP. I have everything working with exception of the scale, it will not automatically input the weights after you scan the package. My question is, where is Visual Link that you are referring to for changing com settings?
Thanks!
Phil,
All you can set in Visual Link for the scale is the COM port and the type of scale. That would be under Settings -> I/O Setup. If its not reading the weight from the scale, you’ll want to check the COM port settings the scale is hooked up to and make sure they’re set up properly. Sometimes the scales are set to use different settings so you might have to cycle through the setup settings on the scale itself to see how its set up.
One quick way to see what settings you should use (if you’re using the same scales on other systems) is to check the COM settings on other shipping stations you’re using. That’s kind of how I figured out what I needed to do with mine.
-Bill
Phil Thomas,
Were you able to get the scale to auto input the weight into Ecometry? I am having that very frusterating issue.
Thank you in advance,
Dave
No, I never was able to. We ditched Ecometry a couple years back too. Its just hot worth the hassle. I ended up building my own order, inventory, and customer management system that better suited our needs.
thank you Bill,
I am going bald over Ecom… they say they cant help me, and Mettler says they cant help me… any way to send a message to Phil Thomas who posted above to see if he was able to get it going?
Hi Dave,
That’s typical Ecometry, telling you they can’t help. When I first inquired about building a shipping station, they just told me to contact their 3rd party supplier who charges a ridiculous amount of money for the computer, scale, etc. setup. And they were POS computer setups.
As far as getting the package weights back into the system, are you talking about getting them from the Mettler scale when using UPS/FedEx? Now that I think about it, I’m not sure we had an issue there. It was more with our USPS integration, getting weights, tracking numbers, and manifest costs back in.
My guess is if you can’t get it to work with UPS/FedEx shipping methods and the scale, then its a COM port setup issue. Unfortunately I don’t have any of the systems setup anymore to verify settings for you. Which Mettler scales are you using? I think the small one’s we used with UPS were Mettler PS60 scales. We don’t have the big one here any more. The COM settings will definitely be different depending on the type of scale and size. Also, you might need to change some settings on the scale itself to match your COM settings on the computer.
Hope some of that information helps you. I know how difficult it can be to deal with Ecometry.