JBR wrote:
Warhead wrote:
My heart sinks whenever I see see a call on my tablet for M62 Birch services, East or West. The briefing always so it's something simple like 'pin entry device not reading cards' or 'printer not working' but it will always turn out to be something much more complicated and time consuming. I've just spent 3 hours there trying to sort out a cash drawer, but it turned out to be a faulty till PC.
Hang on. Are - are you saying... it's PC gone mad!!?
(Apologies to everyone working in technology who has had this joke made to them a million times. I've been away from the workplace for a long time.)
You are excused.
To bore you with detail, these cash drawers aren't connected directly to the till base unit (which is a Windows XP PC) but to an RJ11 port on the receipt printer. This means that if a cash drawer won't open, there are several points where the fault may occur.
1. The cash drawer itself may be faulty. It may attempt to open, because it receives a signal to do so, but the lifting arms that are attached to metal springs, can break. They are only made of plastic and are easy to replace if they break. If one or both of the arms break, the operator can manually lift the lid when they hear the lock click. Or, it may not attempt to open, and you can tell if this is a case because you would't hear the click of the lock disengaging. This could be caused by a knackered solenoid or damage to the cable. We usually just swap the drawer if this is the case as it's quicker than replacing the fiddly latch or solenoid. In 5 years I've never seen this as the fault on a drawer. Even swapping the drawer can be problematic as the drawers are bolted to the counter, but you have to open the drawer to get access to the bolts, and sometimes the bolts, which have cross heads, may be stripped so badly that you need an extractor and electric drill to remove them, and this has to be done when the shop is closed.
2. The interface cable that attached to a 9 pin female plug on the short cable from the drawer, and plugs in to the RJ11 on the receipt printer. Easy to replace .... if you happen to have one available.
3. The receipt printer may be faulty. We can perform a soft or hard reset on the printer to see if that fixes the problem, or swap test it with another "known good" printer.
4. The printer interface cable that attaches it to the base unit may be faulty. These do tend to fray at the powered USB plug that goes into the base unit and are easy to replace .... if you have one.
5. The powered USB socket on the base unit may be faulty. I've never seen this to be the problem.
6. A software glitch on the base unit. If we suspect this is the cause we can either do a full software rebuild, or replace the base unit. A rebuild cakes about 2 hours after we set it running, meaning the till will be out of action for up to two hours.
We can swap test each component in the chain BUT on everything except the cash drawer itself, we have to turn off the till, swap the part and reboot the till, as all other peripherals are not hot swappable. A till reboot can take between 5 and 10 minutes. And there's always the possibility that more than one component is faulty.
So when we get a call for a drawer not opening, it could take anything from about 20 minutes to maybe 3 hours to fix if we keep swapping parts and rebooting the till until the drawer starts to work. Another problem for the engineer is that they don't have an engineer's account so they can't log on to the till, they have to ask a member of staff to log on so they can test the cash drawer and the account logs off after a couple of minutes of inactivity, so we're often having to interrupt store staff to log on for us. And on some counters you can only access the base unit from the customer side, by lifting off a metal cover, and the and the cable runs from the printer and drawer to the base unit can be very fiddly to feed the cable through.
Any questions?