Franking machine
AssigneeAlcatel Business Systems
InventorCyrus Abumehdi
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A franking machine is provided with a general purpose communication port to enable the machine to communicate with other devices. The general purpose port is configurable by the control circuits of the franking machine to match the communication standard utilized by the device connected to the franking machine. Input of a command to cause the franking machine to carry out an operation causes the control circuit to configure the port to a communication standard appropriate to the selected operation.
Claims5
A franking machine for franking items of mail including electronic means to carry out accounting functions in relation to usage of the machine in franking operations;
- storage registers to store account records;
- said electronic means being responsive to command signals to carry out functions indicated by said command signals;
- a secure housing securely containing said electronic means and said storage registers;
- a general purpose communications port comprising a multi-contact connector extending through a wall of said housing to which peripheral devices external to the franking machine may be connected to communicate with said electronic means;
- a plurality of electrical connections connecting the contacts of the connector to the electronic means;
- a group of said contacts having signal carrying functions determined by said electronic means;
- said electronic means being operative in response to a command signal indicating a function to be carried out to determine whether the indicated function requires transmission of signals by way of the general purpose port and a specific peripheral device with which communication is to be effected to set the signal carrying function of the contacts of said group to enable transmission of signals by way of the general purpose port to and from the specific peripheral device and wherein said storage registers store secure and non-secure data and wherein said electronic means is operative in response to said command signal requesting read out of data from said storage registers to determine whether the data requested is secure data and the command requires transmission of the data by way of said general purpose port in encrypted form;
- said electronic means being operative to transmit secure data only if the command signal indicates transmission of the data in encrypted form.
A method of controlling communication through a general purpose port of a franking machine with an external peripheral device comprising the steps of:
- storing secure and non-secure data in storage registers of the franking machine;
- selecting a function to be performed by the franking machine;
- determining whether said function requires communication with an external device;
- in response to determination that communication with an external device is required by said function determining a specific one of a plurality of devices with which communication is required to be effected;
- determining signal carrying functions of connections of the port required for communication with said specific device;
- setting the signal carrying functions of said connections to correspond to those required by said specific peripheral device and
- in response to selection of a function requiring read out of data from the storage registers the steps of determining whether the data to be read out is secure data and that the function requires transmission of the data by way of the general purpose port in encrypted form;
- and
- transmitting the secure data by way of the general purpose port only if the function specifies transmission of the data in encrypted form.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.