Milan / Paylink System Manual Issue 1.5 29 January 2020
CONFIDENTIAL
Not to be disclosed without prior written permission from Aardvark Embedded Solutions Ltd
Page 12 of 71
continuing large updates over a power cycle, although the limitations of the way power fails
can lead to the lost of a single pulse.
System Structure
A system that uses a Milan / Paylink unit comprises a users application that communicates via a DLL
to the Milan firmware installed on the Milan / Paylink unit.
As the Milan / Paylink unit is connected to the PC by a USB cable, there has to be software at both
ends of this USB link to conduct the communications over the link.
At the Milan / Paylink end, this communications software is just built into the firmware. At the PC end,
the communications software runs as a separate Windows item.
USB Connection
USB Lead
The Paylink unit is not designed to be added to and removed from a PC, it is designed to be
permanently connected. Any disconnection and reconnect of the lead will at least cause exception
processing, may cause the Paylink unit to be reset and may cause the interface presented to the PC
to change drastically.
The system should not be regarded as usable for 20 seconds after a Paylink reset, or for 10 seconds
after a USB driver program (re-)start.
USB Driver Program.
As detailed in the “Milan / Paylink System Manual”, the supplied USB driver program Paylink or
AESCDriver has to be run, and should be regarded as a system service and unconditionally started
at system boot. It is possible to stop and start this program, but that causes exception processing to
be undertaken as above, and is not recommended.
In the theoretical model of the Milan / Paylink system there were originally intended to be two options
for this, a normal windows service, installed and managed in the same way as for other services and
as an alternative a Windows program, AESWDriver.exe.
In practice the service option was never completed, and all Milan / Paylink installations prior to
release 1.12.1 / 25.12.1 have used the AESWDriver.exe.
This original program has now been superseded by a new configuring driver program which is
available in two distinct forms: Paylink.exe which only runs under Windows where it also supports
Paylink Lite 2 and USB peripherals made by MCL and AESCDriver.exe, the generic driver program,
primarily used on Linux.
The expected use of the driver program is that during initial program development, the driver is run
and the program window is referred to in order to monitor and control the connection to the
Milan / Paylink. When the system approaches a live configuration the driver program is run silently
with a log file being produced for incident investigation. Finally, the launch of the driver is placed into
the system start up files, where it should be regarded as a system service and unconditionally started
at system boot.
Troubleshooting
As detailed below in the configuration section, the Paylink driver program provides for log file of
limited size to be produced. Where the behaviour of Paylink is unexpected, this file will normally
contain information that allows support personnel to establish precisely what has happened, to
provide advice on how to stop it happening again.
It is therefore strongly advised that all operational systems set the driver up to produce such a log.
To Next Page
Loading...