Technical information

10/29/2014

Page 9 of 72

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6 Host to Reader Communication

Commands and data from the Host to the Reader are sent in the form of commands as specified in this

section.

Commands are normally sent in USB Native, VCOM, or RS232 modes. Commands may not be sent via

keyboard modes.

Two command formats are supported: text-command and packetized-command. Text-command

format is applicable to RS232 and VCOM modes but only if the Reader is configured to accept this

format. Packetized-command format is applicable to all interfaces.

text-command: See Section 6.1.

packetized-command: See Section 6.2.

The command types are explained in Section 6.3.

After the Host sends each complete command, it should wait for a response packet from the Reader.

Expected responses are specified along with the command types in section 6.3. If the Reader responds

with an ‘e’ packet or doesn’t respond within a reasonable timeout period, the Host should resend the

command a reasonable number of times.

6.1 Text Commands

Text commands may be sent to the Reader in RS232 or VCOM mode using any serial communications

software (e.g., HyperTerminal).

Encoded-data is decoded by the Reader by replacing %xx by a single byte with the value specified by

the two hex-digits xx- (e.g., %25 would be replaced by character number 0x25, which is ASCII ‘%’).

text-command: command-type encoded-data

opt

carriage-return

command-type: Single ASCII character in the set defined in Section 6.3

encoded-data: encoded-datum

| encoded-data encoded-datum

encoded-datum: printable-character | % hex-digit hex-digit

printable-character: any byte value in the range [0x20,0x7e]

hex-digit: ‘0’ | ‘1’ | ‘2’ | ‘3’ | ‘4’ | ‘5’ | ‘6’ | ‘7’ | ‘8’ | ‘9’

| ‘A’ | ‘B’ | ‘C’ | ‘D’ | ‘E’ | ‘F’

| ‘a’ | ‘b’ | ‘c’ | ‘d’ | ‘e’ | ‘f’

carriage-return: 0x0d

In order to eliminate inadvertent commanding of the Reader, Text Commands are disabled by

default.

To enable Text Commands requires an initial sequence: ;>PAx where x is as defined in section 8,