While I am locked into the Brother QL-700 for the time being, and I am Googling all sorts of info, has anyone had any success in printing to a thermal printer from a Gadgeteer board? If so, please provide the specs from your successful implementation. Thanks in advance for any assistance.
USB printer class definition only specifies how the data is transferred. You will need a lot of details from the printer manufacture on what sort of data to send to the printer. While not very simple, we have customers who have successfully used USB printers with our products.
Welcome to the community.
Ah, I see asking questions isn’t cool. Got it.
We had a pretty good chat on the phone not too long ago, why is asking questions not cool?
Indeed Gary, we did. Just trying to garner insight from forum experience. Will figure it out without asking questions. Thanks.
@ Luolong - You can call me again if you want, but I am trying to figure out why you don’t want to ask questions. Did I miss a response? If so, just send me the link.
Gus gave you a good answer to your question so I am stumped to your comment.
Gus indicated that you would need information from the printer manufacturer on the protocol needed for your printer and that the USB side is just a transfer method.
What more did you expect?
OK, not trying to pour water on anything here but here’s what I see.
@ Luolong wanted implementation details.
@ Gus says:
USB printer class definition only specifies how the data is transferred. You will need a lot of details from the printer manufacture on what sort of data to send to the printer. While not very simple, we have customers who have successfully used USB printers with our products.
That’s not implementation details, so @ luolong may have assumed the response from Gus was to close down the discussion. But the truth is that Gus uses his phone to respond so these messages are short and sweet. Also, it’s likely that these are other GHI commercial customers, and Gus won’t have details of what they did or how, he just knows it was a solved problem for some printer by some smart people. So the upshot is you should assume someone else has solved the problem, but the solution isn’t something you can leverage.
General comment: for someone totally unaffiliated with GHI, their support has always been top notch, and asking questions is always fine. If it’s a commercially sensitive project then a phone call is often the right way to deal with that.
Just got off the phone with the Brother product manager in NJ. He will either help write a new print driver and/or help write ESC/P Commands.
Also, just read the post from @ Brett and he was correct - thought the responses were more of a shut down. In any event, maybe the team at Brother can provide a solution to help us out. Fingers crossed!
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@ GHI - It looks like there’s a problem here. Why does @ Luolong show as having 0 exp points when he obviously has more?
Maybe this can be of help, the QL-700 is not included but maybe a look-a-like label printer or ask winterheart if he can give you some help.
[url]https://github.com/winterheart/brother-drivers[/url]
Plus, how much locked in are you on netmf ? There are several reports this is working on linux and there is the raspberry pi2.
Since this is supported for Windows too, you may want to use a USB sniffer and analyse the data traffic, but that’s a long windy road.
It, as usual boils down to what you like to achieve. Study project, proof of concept with netmf, and you have plenty of time, go the snif route. A more practicle way and a short time solution, take a pi2, load some linux variant with support for that printer and continue from there.