Printer PCL6 language- Schedule a wake up event?

[Compman55]

We have a group of various Xerox printers that take a long time to warm up. Is there a way to write some kind of script to send out to the printers to wake them up? Possibly using windows task scheduler.

 

[Compman55]

Anyone know if this is possible?

 

[Cogman]

It may be possible, but I'm not familiar enough with the hardware to know what is available.

It for an HP printer, it looks like someone had success sending the pcl reset command to get the printers to wake up. I couldn't say if that would work with the Xerox printer.

If all else fails, sending a white sheet of paper to print will wake up the printers.

Once you have a working script, it should be easy to get a scheduled task running following the directions here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7195503/setting-up-a-cron-job-in-windows

 

[Mike64]

Anyone know if this is possible?

I figured I'd wait to post since I really don't have any experience with this sort of thing, but since you haven't gotten a definite/specific answer, I will second Cogman's comment about the PCL reset command (which is the 2-character sequence "ESC<hex 1B>E", fwiw.) As far as I can tell from a brief review of the PCL documentation, that should work on any printer that uses/can use PCL, but I don't know that for sure. Exactly how you'd get the command to the printers without sending a full blown document, I don't really know. But maybe something as simple as a BAT file with a "type" command redirected or piped to the relevant ports would do it? If that works, it would be easy enough to run such a file as a scheduled task.

On another note, have you checked the printers' settings to see if you can simply disable sleep mode entirely, or at least make the timeout period long enough so that it becomes less of a practical problem? (I just checked my low-end Brother printer, and that won't let me disable sleep mode entirely and will let me extend the timeout period to a max of only 99 minutes, but I'd think even that would probably be long enough in most office/work environments?)

 

[Compman55]

The issue stems from being new units with 30 minute timers to be "green". To make matters worse the first customers in the door in the morning, you have to wait like 2 full minutes for the fusers to warm up from being stone cold. If you goto lunch, the warmup is not bad as they are not in their deep sleep mode.

 

[Mike64]

The issue stems from being new units with 30 minute timers to be "green".

Can that really not be be disabled?

ETA: Oh, wait a minute. I guess you wouldn't want to disable deep-sleep mode overnight. In that case, since it sounds like you only need to do this once a day per printer, Cogman's suggestion of just printing a blank page to each one would work without any real unwanted "side effects", no?

 

[Compman55]

Cannot be disabled, thanks to energy star.

 

[Mike64]

Then the easiest thing to do, I think, is to just send a string of text/a document to each printer from a BAT file set up as a scheduled task, either just using the "type" command, or with Notepad, using a command line switch. For that matter, I'm pretty sure you can even print MS Word documents from the command line (though I'm not familiar with the appropriate syntax and will leave Googling that up as an "exercise for the reader"), so you could even send a full blown Word document if that were for some reason desirable...