making a reciept printer (printing reciepts based on time)

I'm sorry if my title doesn't explain exactly what im trying to convey in this text, please bear with me because English is my second language.
I'm a new user here. OK i am going into a business, i am opening a game center where consoles like xbox 360, playstation 3 etc would be available for people and they can play any game of their choice. i wouldn't be available at this center, i would be employing someone to be in charge of the game center, but based on experiences from my friends, i realized that because the amount of games played daily cannot be quantified, they tend to be cheated by their employees. so in trying to develop a way to solve this issue so that i don't go through the same fate, since the games played are billed by time, i got my answer from 2 unlikely sources,
1. a receipt printer
2. an alarm clock

so i thought, if an alarm clock can be infused someway into a printer and everytime a duration is set and the alarm goes off, a bill is printed it'll go a long way to reduce been cheated by the employees. so i checked online if anything like this has been made and i came out empty in my search. i then decided to look for a site that helps in innovations and i found this site, so i would be grateful if any ideas are available about how i could create this or if theres any such product in the market.

NB: i am an architect, my field is nothing close to electronics, so please reduce or eliminate the use of technical terms.

We need to know more about how the games are enabled when a customer wants to use them. Tell us more about the setup in general.

3v0 said:

We need to know more about how the games are enabled when a customer wants to use them. Tell us more about the setup in general.

Click to expand...

the consoles to be used is the playstation 3. the mode of play presently is (the customers come in to play a game for a duration of ie. 30 mins. because the customer want to play for 30mins, the tv would be timed to turn off at 30 mins, now the problem with this process is, i wouldn't be there to supervise, so i would only take my employee for his word of how many people played game for that day, but no record to show for it. so i came up with the idea if each customer could be timed, and a receipt printed at the end of each period with a record to show for it at the end of the day. i would be glad.

You need some sort of electrical signal that says if each TV is turned on. As you have timers that turn the TVs on and off, that can't be too difficult.

I think what then would be best would be a data logger, with at least one channel for each TV. You would wire each signal that says that a TV is on to one channel of the data logger. The data logger would record when the TVs were on on and when they were off, and would then store that so that you could look at it later. Some data loggers can send the data to a server on the internet.

You could have a look at this https://uk.farnell.com/1715267 which is quite cheap but I think that it needs to be connected to computer to work.

An alternative solution that needs no wiring would be one of these **broken link removed** on the back of each TV. The heat the TVs produce will show you when they are turned on. You would need to download the logs from them.

thanks so much, i'd try it out. . . you were really helpful