EPOS / cash till

Hi,

Has anyone ever used WD to control a cash till / develop an EPOS-type application? If so I'd be interested to get any tips you may have to offer?

Or alternatively, has anyone tried but had to give up?

Cheers
Reg

We have made one POS module in windev for one mess hall and we didn't encouter any major problem in the development process.
The hardware used was from STAR, printer and cash drawer.
The comm with the printer and cash drawer was made using the virtual comm port module of the printer driver, fopen/fwrite funtions of windev and using the printer/cash drawer escape sequences.

Regards

Paulo Oliveira

That's a great help Paulo, thanks very much.

All the best
Reg

Hi Reg,

We developed a full epos and management system using windev -

5 locations with both retail and catering operations with a central management and catering recipe costing attached.

We also had it in English, French and Dutch.

What would you like to know?

Kindest Regards,

Mike

Hi Mike,

Thanks for replying. Can I ask what server/Comms structure you used, e.g. server per site, cloud hosting etc?

And did you have much trouble making the till functions perform fast enough?

Kind Regards
Reg

Hi Reg,

We used a small pc as a local server running Mysql.

We also had a log transaction file on each till point so that if the comms went down, they could still operate. The reason being was that the stock control could be updated later (the physical stock had to be in the store to take to the counter - therefore it could be sold).

For the web sales, we had a stock control file on the cloud server. this was updated about every 15 mins syncro . This updated warehouse stocks and allowed store stock browsing.

The prototype system we made was based on old 486 pc's with touch screen monitors. Now most any epos terminal will work - they are much more powerful than the ones we started with. If you want speed - think of it like a page refresh on somebodies website, the more there is to display (especially pictures) - the longer the transactions will take. The simpler it is the quicker it is.

With regards to epos printers - the bulletproof TMT88 from epson is still going strong. Writing to Comports from within windev is very easy.

I would add that the more that you go into this - the more things you will find. An epos system from scratch is not a 2 minute job. We put in many years and there are still things that can be put into wish lists.

I hope that this helps.

Mike

Yes, that's great Mike, thanks very much