Endicia ES 2200 Weigh Scale

Finally, after spending couple of days on web trying to find solution I was able to read weight from Endicia ES 2200 digital scale in my custom application.

I work for a dot com company and we use Endicia software to print postage labels for USPS shipments. So far we have been shipping USPS shipments with only Flat rate option so exact weigh was not required. Because of increase in postal rates on May 14, 2007 instead of increasing our shipping rates we decided to start shipping using First class option so we could actually reduce shipping rates and keep our customers happy. However this required me to make changes in shipping module to be able to pass exact weight to Endicia interface.

Because of high volume of orders that we need to ship on daily basis to save time we have built a custom application that works as a layer over Endicia's DAZzle and use DAZzles XML interface. So all the user needs to do is scan the order and get a label printed without having to select or answer prompts from DAZzle.

DAZzle had Weigh option which read the weight but that would have required me to set prompting ON and user would have required to click Weigh button first and then Print button to print label so 2 extra buttons to click for every package and that would have slowed down entire shipping process.

To avoid those extra steps it was required for me to be able to read weight within my application and send it in XML along with rest of the data.

We had this Endicia ES 2200 scale but no technical documentation, the documentation that came with it only specified how to connect it so that it works with in DAZzLe. Endica tech support did not have any technical documentation for the scale, only information they had which got me started was ES2200 scale is compatible with other standard serial scales from NCI

After hours on web and lots of trial error, here is what I was able to find and that worked for me to be able to read weight successfully

1. Scale is Weigh-Tronix/NCI 7010 compatible

2. I found the following driver at stamps.com
http://www.stamps.com/support/technical/hardware/10lb-scale/

3. Then I found following documentation for ActiveX control that is installed with the driver above.
http://www.salterbrecknell.com/pdfs/WTCommSclV2.pdf