Two printers through firewire in Production Manager

[genericname]

Hey all,

I have another oddity here. We're getting in a second Mimaki JV3, and in order to reduce the number of computer systems I need to have sitting by my station, I've been running tests to see if I can get two printers to print simultaneously through a single Production Manager, via Firewire.

To test, I've created separate setups for our JV3 and JV4 (the stand in for our testing, before the second JV3 shows up). I point both to their corresponding Firewire connections, one at Firewire_0 and the other at Firewire_2. No matter what I do though, I can't print anything to the JV3. The JV4 seems to take priority, and will print no problem, but when I send a file to the JV3, it'll show its printing percentage as being 0%, and the JV3's LCD panel doesn't display any indication of information being received.

Have any of you run into this before, or have a solution? There's a possibility that we'll just be switching to Onyx, but if this is a hardware conflict of some kind, or a limitation of Firewire technology, that won't help us much.

I've disabled antivirus and firewall software, swapped Firewire cables and Firewire cable positions, reinstalled drivers, rebooted numerous times, and changed the sequence in which I plug in and power up each printer. So far, nothing allows me to use both of them while hooked up to the same system, through Production Manager.

----Edit-----
Using Production Manager 4.6, as part of the PhotoPrintDX Suite

 

[genericname]

Just a status update for posterity's sake, in case I need to remind myself, or if someone is searching for discussion regarding this issue in the future:

The people at SAi tell us it's absolutely impossible, basically forcing the purchase of a second license and the need for a second computer station to house the spooler. I've found a forum post from another community in which someone else had positive results, however, when using new "ultra" drivers from Onyx, on their RIP and spooling platform.

In an attempt to circumvent what I thought was a communication conflict between two Firewire addresses, I installed a second Firewire card into the main spooler computer, and set up each printer under a print to IP scheme, instead of directly targeting their respective Firewire connections. This was done by assigning each 1394 network connection a static IP on our local network. This was also unsuccessful though, and I now suspect that SAi was right in that at least THEIR software will not allow two simultaneous Firewire printers to be connected.

As a result, we may be switching to Onyx if we can get a direct answer from them to reaffirm the comment found in the other forum, regarding newer Onyx drivers allowing two Mimaki printers to operate simultaneously via Firewire, through their RIP and spooling software.

 

[Matthew Scher]

Printing to Mimaki Firewire

You can print to more than a single Mimaki firewire device at a time, but it requires you upgrade to at least PhotoPRINT 6 (or Flexi 8). There was a limitation in older versions that didn't allow it to output to more than one, but that was corrected by updating to a new driver file from Mimaki. Unfortunately, you can't just plug the new driver into the old version - you must upgrade in order to get this.

Excerpt from the readme file: "Mimaki JV3 / JV4 now list all Firewire ports availble and can print to multiple at the same time as long as each is on its own port."

 

[genericname]

Funny, the Flexi rep told us the exact opposite, but I'm more inclined to believe you. Thanks for the heads up!

 

[tbaker]

I've done this, but I'm trying to remember if flexi or onyx was installed. Each printer had to have it's own FW card, make sure you update the card drivers for each, mimiaki has a specific firewire driver for the card. Once it's done there's a little mumbo jummbo to be done in the device manager for the computer system, ensuring that the card is enabled.

I've been sitting here and for the life of me can't remember if it was onyx or flexi, but I seem to recall it was flexi that we got it to work on.

Regardless, good luck!

 

[tcorn1965]

I am printing to two JV3 160sp at the same time through Wasatch. It took me a while, at first I was only able to print to one at a time. I updated the fire wire driver and then I could print to both at same time.

Terry