The serial port receipt printing in Openbravo POS (version 2.30.2) was implemented for 32 bit Windows. To use it on a 64 bit Windows, you will have to swap the rxtxSerial.dll (under the lib\Windows\i368-mingw32 directory) for the 64 bit version. This is available from the jLog project (thanks!). Since they also provide a corresponding RXTXcomm.jar, it makes sense to swap this as well (under the lib directory).
I purchased the Star Micronics TSP 100 thermal printer without realising it has the ability to print Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters as well as Japanese characters. This comes in handy if your products need to be in Chinese (e.g. Chinese restaurant). The printer accepts GB2312 encoded characters for printing Simplified Chinese characters.
A tablet has two important advantages over a laptop/desktop: portability and instant-on (although apparently this is also available on a desktop platform now). These allow you to jump straight into a task the moment you have in mind to do it, wherever you are. That goes well with an order capturing use case. The person tasked to do the order entry is no longer bound to a desk and is free to perform other tasks that require him/her to move about.
Having imported orders from Ubercart into Openbravo POS, i discovered that all is not well as some of the imported orders will somehow disappear afterwards. I have not established the usage pattern under which the disappearance occurs, and decided that it was probably faster to perform a workaround recovery rather than nail down the exact reason for the disappearance.
For whatever reason, if you need to be able to quickly reference your Openbravo POS customer contact information, you will find it useful to export it to your phone contacts. Under normal circumstances, your Openbravo POS should serve as your single data-entry point, and there is no need to duplicate the effort.
Ok, it’s not quite a one-click
Welcome to the world of free and open source Drupal, Ubercart and Openbravo POS. If you didn’t already know, this blog is powered by Drupal. Gone are the days when you need a team of developers to create and maintain a website. Leveraging on Drupal, Ubercart delivers shopping cart functionalities that allow you to host an online storefront. On the other hand, Openbravo POS is a Point-of-Sales system that can sync-up with Openbravo ERP which is a full fledged ERP system. It’s amazing that software that used to cost millions now cost next to nothing.
