Hardware - Label Print Support

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1

Hey all,

I’ve been working on some label printer connections, and am curious what options might be available in the future. In this case, I am working with a non-zebra label printer. Unfortunately, serial printing is rather outdated / reliant largely on the hardware, and therefore using options like the generic serial driver is unlikely to resolve the connection.

Short of suggesting a change to a networked zebra printer or trying to find a DB9 adapter, are there any plans to increase external device support?

Another topic that would be quite helpful is if there is anything planned for custom drivers or an SDK to create new connections to hardware.

Looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts!

2

Hi @BrianHaselton,

Thank you for sharing. The engineering team is starting to build the architecture for the ability for folks to write code to connect to hardware that doesn’t have a driver. The idea here is that we would give you an SDK (Tulip would take care of some of the pain of talking to low-level equipment) and would allow you to upload a driver that you’ve built into your instance.

Do you mind if I ask which specific brand/type of printer that you’re using?

Sincerely,

Jake

3

Hey Jake,

Thanks for the response, this is awesome news.
In this case, I’m remotely supporting, which adds another layer here. To answer your question though - the printer is a Tharo H series.

4

Thanks for posting, Brian! I agree that this tends to be a common issue, there’s a lot of printers that need a USB-only connection to function but without some kind of driver or pre-config, Windows can’t automatically assign it a COM or IP like it would with a DB9 or RJ45 plug.

I would be curious if the lowest hanging fruit, at least for ZPL-based printers, would be to enable support of the “Generic/Text-Only Printer” windows driver (like a user does here). You’ll always need to install the printer on the PC regardless, but if set up with this driver all we would need to send is a raw .txt file of some ZPL.
This would at least get us closer to ‘support’ while avoiding all the complexities and issues inherent with printing actual documents, something that’s an order of magnitude harder.

Worth investigating! Thanks for the feedback.

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