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CHAPTER 5: Operation
4. A record can optionally contain a user-selectable beginning-of-record
character that the TEP must sense before it will recognize any of the
above as valid. Any data received prior to the beginning-of-record
character will be passed or discarded depending on the setting of position
8 of system switch SWF. For example, the TEP won’t recognize an end-of-
record character until it receives a beginning-of-record character; it won’t
start counting the record’s size until it receives the beginning-of-record
character; and it will ignore any inter-record gap until it receives a
beginning-of-record character. Refer to
Section 4.2.1
.
NOTE: Any or all of the above “record defining” rules can be individually set
for each slave port by using the initialization menu. For example, you can
define for slave port 1 that records must end with a carriage return and/or
a maximum size of 40 bytes, for slave port 2 that records must end with an
[ETX], for slave port 3 that records must be 80 bytes long, for slave port 4
that records must be 132 characters or terminated by an inter-record gap
of 250 ms, and so on.
5.5.4 F
ORMATTING OF
S
LAVE
D
ATA IN
C
ONCENTRATE
M
ODES AND
C
ONVERSATION
M
ODE
The slave data that is sent to the master device can optionally be formatted to
match your display needs in either of the Concentrate modes or Conversation
Mode (not Transparent Conversation mode). This formatting of data may be
useful when a slave’s data is being viewed by a user at a display device such as
a printer or terminal/console. The formatting is also useful when a slave’s
data is being received and processed or recorded by a PC program. Both the
program and those who retrieve data from it may find it easier to handle the
data if it is formatted differently.
The formatting can generally be described as adding or stripping data from
the original data stream of the slave. For example, the slave data can be
preceded by a user-assigned label that can uniquely identify which slave port
the data was received from (for example, “scale #1”). All of the formatting
options are optional and can be enabled by either setting DIP switches or by
accessing the initialization menu.
