Using the CUCPS Tape Punch

CUCPS has a Facit 4070 paper tape punch which is used to create membership cards. The cards are of the standard 50x85mm credit-cardish size, and have membership details punched along one edge. The details are also given in human-readable form for mere mortals.

Producing membership cards is not tricky; this page aims to document the process so new Junior Treasurers can take over the job of punching new cards without too much difficulty.

Before You Start...

You will need the following bits and pieces:

• Facit 4070 punch with appropriate modifications (already made to the CUCPS punch).
• Interfacing dongle (a trivial special purpose bit of hardware; you don't need the technical details unless the CUCPS one has broken...)
  
• 25 pin D-type male-male straight through cable.
• A PC running Linux. Other machines and OSes might work, but this is the setup I use. You need a way to set the duration of the STROBE pulse, which is done under Linux with lptune; this is the only OS/machine dependency.
• The punchcard.pl perl script
• Some card. WHSmiths do single sheets of A4 card for 10p each, which work nicely. If the card is too thick it won't punch well or even fit in the punch at all.

Setting Up...

• Connect the interfacing dongle directly to the punch.
• The straight-through cable goes between the dongle and the PC's parallel port.
• If there is paper tape fed through the mechanism, unthread it. Tape can be safely left on the lower feed reel.
• Tie the moving feed roller to the fixed rollers with string, wire or elastic band so that it is about halfway across. If the ERROR light lights when you turn the punch on, the roller is too close or too far from the fixed rollers.
• Cut the card into strips 50mm wide, parallel to the long axis of the card. Trinity library has a trimmer which is useful for this.

Here We Go...

This is how we actually punch a card...

• Plug the punch into the mains.
• Turn on the POWER ON switch. Press the DC ON switch (this one is a momentary-contact switch); the READY light should light. If the TAPE LOW light is lit you can ignore it. (We power up before feeding in the card because the punch has a tendency to punch a stray hole at power up/down).
• Pull down the plastic flap at the front of the punch.
• Insert a strip of card into the punch. The card goes behind the springy guide thing to the right. You'll need to frob the pinch roller lever to get the left edge of the strip under it.
• Run the punchcard.pl script. It will ask you for membership number (in the standard convention: leading 0x for hex, else leading 0 for octal, else decimal), userid and membership status. Enter these, and the punch should start to work. [NB: you'll probably need to be root to run the script.] There are about thirty characters to be punched at the slow speed of one every second or two, so be patient :-)
• When the script finishes, you can run it again without touching the punch to create another card. You should be able to get three cards per strip.
• Extract the strip from the punch, and cut it into the separate cards. It's pretty obvious where the boundaries lie. Cut off the leader at the front of the strip; each card should have feed holes running all the way across it.

Human-Readable Stuff...

I'll write the documentation on this bit as soon as I get the dotmatrix printer and work out how to use it!