Re: [hpoj-devel] patch to improve scan speed/robustness

[<pa...@rc...>]

Hi, Joe.

I wrote:
> > The 570 I have perpetually scrolls the message "See instructions to print
> > demo page" or something like that, except when it has a more urgent message
> > to display.  If I remember correctly, when I ran the original xojpanel
> > (which presumably didn't scroll text by itself) with this peripheral, the
> > message scrolled on the screen at more or less the same rate.
OK, so my mind was playing tricks on me.  I tried it again, and sure enough,
the original xojpanel didn't scroll and the new one does, meaning that as
you said, the peripheral reports the whole string, even on the 570.

> Can you check the xojpanel output again to see what's really happening, and
> how long the string is, if you can see it all? The last release of xojpanel
> has a problem finding its lcd pixmap, but if run from the xojpanel/ build
> directory, it shouldn't have any trouble.
The fallback-to-current-directory feature is broken.  I had to create a
symlink from /usr/local/share/pixmaps/hpoj in order for xojpanel to work.
I looked in the code, and for hpojlcd.xpm and ojforlinux.xpm, you're
printing an error message and returning a failure code before you even
try to load from the current directory.  Try deleting or renaming your
/usr/local/share/pixmaps/hpoj directory and you'll see what I mean.

> If you can get "hpo set" working, can you get it to automatically set the
> Time/Date on the printer? The 600's clock has to be reset every time the
> printer is turned on.
That should work.  According to the documentation I have,
OID_DEV_DATE_AND_TIME takes a binary structure consisting of the following
bytes: year (presumably the last two digits), month, day, day of week,
hour, minute, and second.  However, I'm surprised that the peripheral doesn't
keep up with the date/time while powered off.  Does it forget it both when
you power it off just with the power button, or when you physically unplug
it?  I'm not familiar with this particular model, so perhaps this is how
it was designed, or perhaps it has a dead battery or something like that.

Here are some other suggestions offhand from my first time of playing around
with your new version of xojpanel:

- Don't distribute "Makefile".  That is generated automatically by the
configure script, and contains pathnames specific to your system.

- See comment above regarding failure to load pixmaps from current directory.

- It might be nice to scroll a little faster, but when it scrolls to the end,
delay for a second or two before you start over.  Perhaps you could make the
scroll rate and end-of-scroll delay configurable.

- The second line does scroll.  However, for some reason, the peripheral
returns a large number of trailing spaces on the second line, which is
visible even with "hpo get OID_STATUS_MSG_LINE2_PART1".  This means that
every 2nd-line message scrolls away and stays blank for a while.  I would
suggest that for both lines, you strip trailing (but probably not leading)
whitespace as soon as you read them from the peripheral.

- I would prefer that you replaced "Oj" in the titlebar with either
"OfficeJet" or "HP OfficeJet".

- What does the asterisk after "Linux" mean?

- I like your Line2TestString.  :-)

Overall I like your new version a lot.  Good job, and thanks for working on
this!

David