Category: Geeks r Us
Recently, I got a Braille Blazer off of ebay. I turned it on and everything seemed fine. The speech worked and all the buttons functioned. It even correctly brailled a test page. I got the full version of Duxbury and installed it on the XP desktop. I created a document with Wordpad and then imported it with DBT as a standard Windows file. I set the embosser to blazer and the port to serial. I translated the document into braille but when I tried to emboss, it said that it was embossing the document but did nothing and it gave me an error when I hit escape. So I changed the stop bits to 1 instead of 2 and the same thing happened. pI tried using a parallel cord But when I tried to emboss that time it did nothing at all, even when I hit escape.
A few days later, I Called an unofficial expert in the use of Duxbury and we tried all sorts of things, from changing the handshaking to hardware and then to software both in the Blazer and the computer, to checking the properties of com1, to unchecking the box in xp under the device manager that said higher performance, to trying to print something out the serial port using the dos prompt. Nothing. It either gave me an i/o1418 (something like that) error or said embossing but never did and said something like "w32 dev trans error 601) whenever I'd hit emboss. Today, I got my Keyspan usb to serial adapter and plugged into my Mac, figuring I'd try the Blazer with Louis but the same thing happened. It's set to send the file div/null but when I hit the run translation button it did nothing. When I went into the Emboss application it said it was embossing but did nothing. It even finished without any errors being reported. I'm honestly beginning to wonder if it'll work properly on my 98 machine once I get that set up and I'm looking for my Braille Lite 2,000 and/or Braille Note to see if it'll work with one of them.
Gods I hope this isn't a hardware problem. I'd hate to have to tell Spiros that there's something wrong with the embosser, especially after he got it for my birthday. Can anyone help?
If you try it again on your xp machine, try it via the paralel port.
First in the control panel under printers and fax, add a new printer. Select the add manual or have disk option, and when you're presented with a list of manufacturers to select from, choose generic text based printer. For text output insure it's set to text, usually this is the only option. Lastly name the printer whatever you choose, and do not print a test page.
Then in duxbury depending on which version you have insure the port is set to LPT1 or if possible set it to windows device and make sure it's pointing to your generic text based printer whatever you've named it.
TO insure we're working with a clean setup on the blazer, turn the unit off and power up while holding down all three keys. Power on and continue holding for about 3 seconds. When prompted ok to reset, press all three buttons again, and it'll say braille blazer ready. Reboot your computer and attempt printing again.
If this still doesn't work, in the device manager under ports com and LPT insure your LPT port says printer port, if it says ECP port, you'll want to update the driver to reflect a standard printer port.
You can manually do this by pressing applications key, or shift f10 on the LPT item, and go to update driver, Again choose all the manual options, and when you get to the checkbox that says show only list of compatible drivers, un check it. You'll get an error that windows doesn't recommend doing so but disregard this. Then, tab to the box that says something to the affect of port type, and insure it's on standard printer port. Click finish and allow the standard printer port driver to be installed.
Actually, if it were me, this is the first thing I'd check.
Let me know if I can be of any further help.
Excellent advice, though I bought several things from Ebay and never received one of them. I suspect that the person knew this was an issue and sold it as is and never said anything about it. Ebay to me is very shady.