Detecting Network Print Jobs.

[Magnified]

Hi all,

I'm doing work for a client of mine who would like to have a siren or light notify the user when a print job is detected in his warehouse.

Unfortuantely, the printer has an embedded print server, which is connected to a hub/router/switch using RJ45 cabling.

I'm a software developer with some good electricial experience. What do you think is possible? Wiring up a light/siren is no problem, its detecting the print job on the printer. Since the RJ45 line is a serial pipe, there will occasionally be traffic on the pipe that is NOT a print job, so tapping one of the lines into a relay just wont work.

Just curious to see if anybody thinks this is possible.
Mike

[PrntRhd]

You might be able to make a sensor that would be triggered by the paper exiting the printer, and that event triggering a light.

[Erik]

Is it a laser printer? When they start up to print they pull a pretty big load. You could probably wire up something to set of the alert whenever there is a bigger load pulled by that printer.