Research On The Rtos Applied To Thermal Printer

The thermal printer is famous for its fast print speed, high-quality, the low costof the integrated use, is widely used in the field of transaction slip, notes, barcode/label printing. And more and more requirements are put forward in the thermalprinter market, such as more localized language support, support for more complexman-machine interface, and support for richer means of communication, support forricher external module and so on. Drawbacks on traditional thermal printer withfront and back office processing mode are not able to meet the above demands.To improve development efficiency, ensure the quality of the development anduse the full range of existing software modules, introduction of the operating systemis imperative to the development of the thermal printer. By introducing the operatingsystem, various mature platform drivers, protocol stacks, middleware andapplication software can be applied to the printer, the shortcomings come fromtradition design can be remedied and the qualities of the product is promoted, so thisarticle deals with the following work:First, the Real Time Operating System(RTOS) developing platform wasestablished, by taking the index of feasibility like economical etc. of variousoperation system into consideration, the eCos3.0system was chosen. In order to getfamiliar to the development process tests were carried out on the finished systemwith i386which was embodied in the eCos3.0. The tests result indicated that theplatform was established successfully.Then, test of system transplant was done on board SmartARM2400, thetransplant of Hardware Abstract Layer (HAL),including Flash driver and file systemwere mainly discussed here, what’s more, the relevant transplant tests were carriedout, and the results indicated that eCos system was successfully transplant to theARM board.Furthermore, the eCos system was transplant to the target board98NP,alsorelevant test was done, the test showed that the transplant was successful, based onthis, the program of buttons and LED was added to the board and tested, the resultshowed that when finished transplanting the relevant services programs could beadded to the board.Finally, the partition of service blocks and the order of the priority level weregiven. The service programs were added to the board, and tests were done on theprinter system, real-time test, communication, printing quality included. The testsresults indicated that when the frequency of CPU running was given the real-timequality of Flash where the program was running on was better than that of SDRAN, what’s more, the higher of the CPU running frequency, the better quality ofreal-time no matter the program was running in the flash or the SDRAM, and thecommunication quality between the PC and the target board was sound, the printingquality was good.This article mainly deals with the application of RTOS on the thermal printer,the conclusions and data acquired here could be used as reference when using RTOSon other devices.