Ams has created its own "Generic" printer communication protocol and a Part Print Driver that utilizes it. In the past, AMS has written a driver for nearly every printer that a printer salesmen convinces customers that they can't live without. We have now written a protocol that printer manufacturers can use to integrate printers if they desire to sell printers to our customers. The manufacturer can either modify their printer to use our driver or they or the customer can pay a third party integrator to do it for them.

The code was written in such a way that a driver for bundle ticket printers can also easily be written using the same protocol.

This new driver supports up to nine print streams. Provided that the print system supports it, each of the print streams is able to contain a unique print message. In order to support multiple print streams the printer system must be controlled by a single encoder and print trigger. The print system must accept the streams for all printers, manage the print trigger and distribute the message to the appropriate printer. Similar to tools in the XL controller, the print system must know where each print head is and adjust where it prints so that the single trigger will be able to accurately print information on the part at the correct location. Contained within the print stream are the X coordinates, in inches, referenced from the trigger location where each piece of information is to be printed.

Due to the time constraints of when this driver is required, Asynchronous printing is not currently supported by this driver.

The only printer so far that supports this new driver is the Matthews MPERIA system. A Lua script is used to convert the Ams Generic protocol to the XML protocol that the MPERIA system uses internally. The Lua MPERIA Generic Driver Script is checked into source control with the AMS Generic Driver. How the script is distributed and instructions for installing the script are yet to be deteremined and generated.