A PaperCut Paxton integration

A few weeks ago, one of our PaperCut resellers came to us with a problem “PaperCut Paxton support?” and (insert sound of own trumpet being blown) we delivered a solution.

The Problem?

A few of the schools this reseller provides services to wished to monitor prints and copies on Ricoh machines. They wanted staff and students to be issued with wireless contact cards and for users to walk up to the copiers “swipe” the card and be presented with two options:

1. release any prints sent to the device by the user;
2. start photocopying and have everything charged to a central store.

PaperCut MF and embedded software were chosen and everything should have worked fine apart from one small issue. The cards they had issued staff/students with were “Paxton cards” from the Net2 Access system.

The Answer

The first task was to find a reader that could read something unique off each card.
The second task was to get this mystery reader working with a photocopier (something of a black art)

I will skip all the boring bits but after a few weeks of hard work, tweaking, cursing and generally finding the rest of the world useless we now have a system in place for this to work perfectly. At the same time, we learned a lot about card readers on the Ricoh platform and we are fairly confident we can now get any card reader working.