For this upcoming Halloween, we’re moving the Morbid Industries warehouse out to California. It was a business decision a long time coming. Shipping product from China to the East Coast and then back across the country was getting expensive. A lot of our customers are on the West Coast too, so we were basically shipping product in containers across the country for nothing. So, because we were doing this, and we use Escalate Retail’s Ecometry for order management, I needed to build a shipping station to send out there. Ecometry sends you to Agilysys, for pre-built shipping stations, however, they’re really expensive and we were looking to save some money. I had read on the Ecometry Google newsgroup that people had built their own, so I decided to brave it and do the same.
I’d like to thank a couple of people for there help right off the bat. Paul, a support engineer from Datalogic/PSC was a big help getting the right interface cable I needed and helping with programming the scanner to read our barcodes properly. Also, Daniel Lively for his suggestions on the Ecometry Google newsgroup. Thanks guys!
Here’s the list of parts I used:
- Dell Optiplex computer
- Zebra Z4MPlus Thermal Printer
- Mettler Toledo PS60 scale
- SIIG Cyber 2S1P (model #JJ-P21012-S6) Dual serial port and Parallel port card
- PSC Powerscan PSSR-1110
- PSC AT keyboard wedge Y cable Model #8-0738-03
- AT to PS/2 adapter
- PS/2 to AT adapter
Pretty much you can hook up the entire thing and it will work. For the scale, you need to set your COM port to the following settings:
- Baud Rate: 9600
- Databits: 7
- Parity: Event
- Stop Bits: 2
- Flow control: X on X off
For programming the scanner, you can find documentation on Datalogic’s website here. The programming guide that I needed for the model scanner I purchased is here. Depending on the scanner model you use, you’ll need a different programming guide so that you can scan the right bar codes for your application. We enabled Code 39 and Code 128 since we scan FedEx bar codes.
A couple of additional notes. I’m not sure I actually needed the SIIG Cyber 2S1P card as I would have had enough ports to hook up all the equipment. It was recommended on the newsgroup to get one for the scale. I was also told an easier setup with the PSC Powerscans is to use PSSR-7000 and a USB interface. They’re really easy to set up I guess. Also, in place of the Zebra Z4MPlus thermal printer, you can supposedly use a Zebra S600 or a S400, which are cheaper.
Most of the parts I sourced on eBay. I think all said and done, we paid less than $1,000 for the entire shipping station. The computer was free as we had one kicking around, but you can use pretty much any computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I just recommend having a bit of memory in it so it isn’t a complete slug. I believe this is significantly less expensive than buying a pre-built shipping station through Agilysys. It’s faster than the one we originally bought from them too!