Paylink System Controller
Paylink Lite V2
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> Products: Paylink Lite V2 > Support and Downloads
   

Support for the Paylink Money Handling System is provided in these pages. From here you can access the latest Downloads, Frequently Asked Questions, or alternatively you can try our Support Forum.

If you have a problem, please take the time out to look at our FAQ section here.

Advice on the purchase of suitable money handling peripherals and support for problems of a purely hardware nature, is provided by our manufacturing / marketing partner, Crane PI. You can contact their sales department with an enquiry from this page

If you have a problem of detailed software nature then the support forum might contain someone else’s similar experience. If you’re problem is a new one, then the best way to tell us about it is to create a new thread in that forum. In that way, you will benefit from the advice of other users. There is no quicker way to contact our support staff, but if your problem is of a confidential nature, you can contact them at support@aardvark.eu.com.

If the Paylink System fails to work with the software you have written, please take the time out to run the demo programs provided as part of the SDK. These are used by Aardvark staff to test the product during development.

If the failure is evident with these demo programs, then we will find it much easier to troubleshoot your problem. If the failure is not evident, then that will indicate that you are using the interface in a different way, and we will probably want to ask some quite detailed questions.

Development Platform
Although the Paylink Lite V2 System is fully supported on any Linux distribution as well as Windows on a PC, the Aardvark Development team use Windows PCs to work on the Paylink software. This means that the distribution and debugging tools are slightly biased to this environment.

If you have access to a Windows PC, then we recommend that you use the released SDK (see below). If you only have access to a Linux based system, you will still be able to use the Paylink Lite V2 System without any problems by downloading the Linux release files below.

Product Updating
With the Paylink Lite V2 all the software required to interface to the peripherals is included as a part of the Paylink.exe driver program. To handle new peripherals, or to fix faults you will need a new copy of this program.

There are some PC utilities to aid in fault finding. Copies of these form a part of the SDK on the Paylink Installer (see below) and some are available below.

These links will enable you to obtain the latest fully supported versions. Although some of the software downloads consist of a single executable, they are all saved as zip files, as the default (run) operation of the executable is unlikely to be useful!

The main release of the SDK is now as a standard Microsoft Installation file (.MSI) for Windows. If you download that and run it, it will extract the SDK into your specified folders, install the USB drivers and interface DLLs into the correct locations and if you wish run a WalkThrough program that will check that your system is ready to run Paylink Applications.

For most of the other technical files you can just extract the executables from the zip into a handy folder and run them.

The Linux distributions are as tar.gz files, which can be unpacked and installed on a Linux system. Full details on this process are given in the Linux User Guide.

Software  
Complete SDK (PC Windows Installation File)
Basic Linux Installation (Source Files)
Linux PC USB / Lite V2 Peripheral Support add on.
Raspberry Pi USB / Lite V2 Peripheral Support add on
 
 
Documentation
.
Paylink System Description Manual
Full Programmers Reference
Linux Programmers Guide
Raspberry Pi Programmers Guide
Guide to the Dot Net Facilities
Guide to the Java Facilities
Coin / note table update (for MCL equipment) Reference
Paylink Lite V2 Unit Technical Manual
Release Descriptions
.
Milan 1.12.14 Release Note
Milan 1.12.13 was withdrawn due a major error
Milan 1.12.12 Release Note
Milan 1.12.11 Release Note
Milan 1.12.10 Release Note
Milan 1.12.9 Release Note
Milan 1.11.8 Release Note

Other Downloads
In addition to the above downloads, you can also visit the standard Paylink complete download page here to obtain testing (Beta) versions of the utilities and firmware, and older versions versions of the firmware.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The following list of common problems and their answers has been mainly extracted from our support forum, so please visit that if you can't find your problem here.

Frequently Asked Questions.
 
1
Q. What operating systems will the Milan / Paylink Lite Interface run under?
.
Paylink Lite V2 will run on all Windows or Linux PC Systems. If you are using Windows and wish to use C# (Dot Net), then class libraries and examples for Dot Net 4.0 and above are provided, ready to use, as a part of the standard installation.
Paylink Lite V2 is supported on all Intel / PC Linux Distros, both 32 and 64 versions as well as the Raspberry Pi running a 32 bit armhf (not arm64) system. The Raspberry Pi code has been tested on Raspbian, 32 bit Ubuntu, and 32 bit Suse.
 
2
Q. What difference will I see using Paylink Lite rather than standard Paylink?
.
A. Once you've connected up your system, you should expect to see no detecable difference between the standard Paylink and the Lite versions.
 
8
Q. I've connected the Paylink Lite and my system continually makes the USB unplugged / plugged sounds.
.
A. As a part of the system reliability, if the Driver program is not communicating with the Lite unit, the unit itself will repeatedly unplug itself to try to clear any USB problems. If you run the driver program, this will stop.
 
3
Q. What peripheral equipment does the Milan Interface part of the Paylink System support?
.
A. Please see the Technical Description page.
 
 
6
Q. I’ve connected up 12V and a cctalk coin acceptor and hopper, why doesn’t the interface report any peripherals? or
What does the diagnostic message
"cctalk: Data line frozen"
mean?
.
A. Although the Milan Interface unit cctalk connector includes 12v and 24v, only the 12v is fed through from the 2 pin JST connecter, the 24v is a "pass through" from an external. power supply. If you haven’t provided a 24v supply, then the hopper will “freeze” the cctalk bus (short it to ground) a fault which Paylink firmware can recognise. If you remove the hopper, the acceptor should be found and the diagnostic stop.
.
7
Q. I want to use the coin routing facilities of my coin acceptor to feed the hopper until it is full, and divert coins to the cash box afterwards.
.
A. On both the standard and the Lite versions, there are the same comprehensive facilities to enable you to easily achieve this. Although easy to implement, they are slightly difficult to understand; so please refer to the section entitled “Coin Routing” in the System Description Manual, which gives full details. If you are still confused, then the support forum has topics on this subject.
 
9
Q. I don’t want the equipment to accept money from my customer until I am ready. How do I arrange for this to happen?
.
A. When the Milan Interface powers up, it inhibits all the peripherals, in which state they will automatically reject any money. At this point you can call OpenInterface, Current Value, ReadAcceptorDetails and ReadDispenserDetails to find out where you’re starting from. You can pre-set individual inhibits (see next question) and then you call EnableInterface. EnableInterface is how you announce to the Milan / Paylink Interface that you're ready to go, until you call EnableInterface everything is disabled / inhibited, regardless of the AcceptorBlock setting. After you call it, they will correspond to the settings you have made. (They are all enabled by default.).
 
10
Q. How do I control which acceptors, coins and hoppers will be working at any given time?
.
A. You use ReadAcceptorDetails / WriteAcceptorDetails and ReadDispensorDetails / WriteDispenserDetails. These use interface blocks that are described in the Application Interface Manual. Specifically:
  • To inhibit / enable an acceptor set / clear the ACCEPTOR_INHIBIT bit in the AcceptorBlock.Status field and then write the details back
  • To inhibit / enable a specific coin, set / clear the Acceptor.Coin[CoinNumber].Inhibit field (to 1 / 0), and then write the details back.
  • To inhibit / enable a dispenser set / clear the DispenserBlock.Inhibit field (to 1 / 0) and then write the details back.
In all cases you find the correct block by performing a check along the lines of:
(xxxxBlock.Unit & DP_GENERIC_MASK) ==
                         DP_COIN_ACCEPT_DEVICE
or DP_NOTE_ACCEPT_DEVICE or DP_COIN_PAYOUT_DEVICE
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