Introduction

The Order Confirmation Board (OCB) is a specialized channel designed to display order information on NexSigns digital signage. In this article, we’ll cover the requirements for a 3rd party system to transmit required data through LAN communication.

Network Communication

Overview

The network communication diagram above demonstrates different methods of communication between POS Terminal or Back Office Server (denoted as POS from this point onwards) and Digital Signage Display (WLAN or LAN) (denote as Digital Signage from this point onwards). There are a few preliminary network requirements that must be satisfied in order to connect OCB with POS:

• Both POS and Digital Signage must operate within the same subnet

• Digital Signage running on LAN and Wireless LAN (WLAN) must be reachable from clients within the same subnet

Connection Methods

OCB accepts several different ways to send and receive the packet data via the network from POS to Digital Signage. There are advantages and disadvantages with each method, and depending on your network, you may prefer one over another.

Method 1: Unicast

The data packet can be sent via the unicast method. In addition to the requirements above, this method has additional requirements

• Digital Signage must be assigned with a static IP address. Alternatively, you can always assign a static address via DHCP on your router based on the MAC address of Digital Signage.

• The POS must be programmed to send the communication over TCP to the static IP address assigned to Digital Signage

In unicast mode via TCP, the POS is considered as the client while Digital Signage is considered as the server. The OCB channel in Digital Signage will be listening on a pre-defined port for an incoming connection. The port number can be changed via the OnePass OCB channel setting. The connection will remain open until at least one of the following conditions are true

• POS (Client) closed connection

• Digital Signage (Server) encountered an error due to network physical layer interruption

To reduce unwanted transmission and increase efficiency in unicast via TCP, it is important to understand that once the connection is established (after a 3-way handshake), the connection can remain open. OCB channel has the ability to accept multiple connections and each connection will work independently. However, it is important to understand potential issues that may arise when multiple open connections are connected to a single Digital Signage OCB channel.

• When multiple connections are sending data at the same time, the order of data arrival can become unpredictable due to potential network latency and interference.

• When multiple data is received by the Digital Signage OCB channel, only the latest data will be used.

Method 2: Broadcast / Multicast

The data packet can be sent via the broadcast method. In this method, you do not need to statistically assign the Digital Signage IP address. When broadcasting or multicasting, the communication will be using UDP.

Data Format

Each OCB channel will be given a unique ID name that can be defined by the user via OnePass. The data format must start with the unique ID name follow up an LF (Char10). Consider the following example function generating the data.

OCB Order Data

OCB Order Data is the actual content to be displayed within the OCB channel. The number of characters per line and number of lines may vary depending on the font-size and the dimension of OCB width and height with respect to the screen segmentation assigned to the OCB channel. It is important to assume the typographic that will be used will be a block-letter font that provides uniform width and height across all characters (i.e. The letter “i” is the same width as the letter “M”).

Each line should end with LF (Char10). The concept is extremely similar to POS Line Display.

OCB Behavior

The OCB channel will have the following behavior logic

Need Help?

If you have any questions regarding OCB integration, contact the Kuusoft Support Team.