E-waste is always an adventure, never know what may pop up next. Sometimes it's industrial automation, crappy android tablet, and rarely true gems of tech. When your friend gets an opportunity to purchase some touchscreen point of sale computer terminals along with the kitchen video display controllers for order management, you know you've got a winner on your hands.
We've got hardware, software, and networking to think about.
Hardware starts with some Panasonic JS-960 point of sale units. They are simple x86 based machines running Windows 7 Embedded POSReady, some have magnetic stripe readers or VFDs integrated.
The kitchen display units are embedded devices using a x86 processor and simple graphics chip similar to 8-bit micros of the day. Fonts are downloaded by the management software (more below), and it's all driven by UDP multicast traffic.
Now onto software. Thankfully we obtained complete units, hard drives intact! Can you believe it...iQtouch from a Dairy Queen! iQtouch runs on Windows 7 embedded, using MSSQL Express and lots of their own protocols and drivers for communicating with other devices. External POS devices to iQtouch use OPOS and rely on the manufacturers provided drivers/SDK. This works great on Panasonic hardware, considering Quickservice Tech has been purchased by Panasonic Solutions, as well as on a Xen VM server (lol).
Networking, thankfully this time it isn't going to be DNS. Static IPs, DHCP, whatever you'd like. Somehow this POS just figures it out, same with the QSR KDS system!
By default the IP subnet is 192.168.11.0/24 and assignments look like this:
- 192.168.11.81 T1
- 192.168.11.82 T2
- 192.168.11.83 T3
- 192.168.11.84 T4
- 192.168.11.89 KDS1
- 192.168.11.88 KDS2
- 192.168.11.87 KDS3
- 192.168.11.88 KDS4
More to come in future posts regarding networking protocols in use. The QSR KDS system uses UDP multicast, I've started reverse engineering the protocol driving the displays. It will be interesting to see how it functions, is it an RFB, text character buffer like CDG Karaoke, something else entirely?
Next post let's focus on getting the KDS working. Currently I'm getting a licensing error when the application starts...
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