Billing system for CUPS

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply. The cards are pretty simple actually. Students add  some dollar amount to their cards at various machines around campus. When they want to purchase things around campus, they can use the card like a credit card at the point of purchase. Our print system uses cash card readers (Danyl) to deduct the fee from their cards. That's about it, there's not much else to them. Using the CUPS accounting capability, we can produce statistics on lab printing. We do this now with Uniprint, but its a costly solution, that I think could easily be replaced by CUPS .

> On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 11:44:33AM -0400, Lorenzo Thurman wrote:
> > I've asked this before, and found there was nothing suitable, so I
> > asking again on the chance that things have changed. A quick Google
> > search turned up nothing, so here goes:
> >
> > We use the Pharos Uniprint system to bill university students for
> > printing in the public labs. Uniprint can withdraw the fee from the
> > student's cash card. Is there anything like this yet for CUPS? There
> > was something before that would bill a student account via CUPS, but
> > that won't work for us. But as a subproject, it might be something
> > we might be interested in undertaking, if we can get some help.
>
> On the proprietary software side, I think PaperCut NG can probably
> do what you want (http://www.papercut.biz)
>
> There are several Free Software which could be more or less easily
> extended to do such things, because to my knowledge none of them
> support cash cards.
>
> If you're willing to give me sufficient details on how these cards
> work, I'd be glad to make such a system work with PyKota
> (http://www.librelogiciel.com/software/PyKota/action_Presentation)
> in a future release.
>
> bye
>
> Jerome Alet
>