I’ve published a new extension at https://tastyigniter.com/marketplace/item/cupnoodles-starcloudprnt for connecting a CloudPRNT-enabled printer to your TastyIgniter server. Requirements/Supported printers TSP654II SP742 TSP743II TSP847II mC-Print3 mC-Print2 Please note that CloudPRNT is only available for LAN and WLAN devices - if you have a printer listed above but it only has a USB port (no Ethernet) then this extension will not work for you. Additionally, the printer must be connected to the internet in order to function. Please keep your kitchen layout in mind to ensure good internet access for your printer! Features Printer management for multiple printers and locations Receipt and Ticket Layout editor with preview, thanks to templating in ReceiptLine Manual and Automatic printing of tickets and receipts, editable per-printer and per-layout Print Queue with individual print jobs delete-able from admin, to clear out lingering requests in case of errors Experimental Features full-image rendered receipts, for legible printing of complex characters font selection via free webfonts Please note that the experimental features are very experimental! They may or may not work on your server, and will become core features in a future release if proven stable. Support Please post support issues on this thread!

New Printer Extension for Star Micronics CloudPRNT

cupnoodles

I’ve published a new extension at https://tastyigniter.com/marketplace/item/cupnoodles-starcloudprnt for connecting a CloudPRNT-enabled printer to your TastyIgniter server.

Requirements/Supported printers

TSP654II
SP742
TSP743II
TSP847II
mC-Print3
mC-Print2

Please note that CloudPRNT is only available for LAN and WLAN devices - if you have a printer listed above but it only has a USB port (no Ethernet) then this extension will not work for you.

Additionally, the printer must be connected to the internet in order to function. Please keep your kitchen layout in mind to ensure good internet access for your printer!

Features

Printer management for multiple printers and locations
Receipt and Ticket Layout editor with preview, thanks to templating in ReceiptLine
Manual and Automatic printing of tickets and receipts, editable per-printer and per-layout
Print Queue with individual print jobs delete-able from admin, to clear out lingering requests in case of errors

Experimental Features

full-image rendered receipts, for legible printing of complex characters
font selection via free webfonts

Please note that the experimental features are very experimental! They may or may not work on your server, and will become core features in a future release if proven stable.

Support

Please post support issues on this thread!

martin352

cupnoodles

Hey! Hope all is well.
I was checking out your STAR CloudPRNT extension on the marketplace, and it looks really good.
May I check with you if it has a similar issue as the other main printer extension where it prints multiple tickets if you have more than one admin tab open at the same time?
And are you still using it yourself? I noticed a comment on another thread which I thought implied you may be using the other extension. Is there anything in particular that the other extension does that yours does not?
Thanks!

ryanmitchell

Awesome work ❤️

cupnoodles

Hi, and thanks for checking out the ext! The StarCloudPRNT ext does not have the multiple-printing issue, since the print command relies on polling from the printer itself. And yes, I’m using it myself and haven’t seen any major issues.

The primary difference with the other printer ext is that this one only works with Star Micronics printers that have CloudPRNT(mc-print2/3, tsp-6** i think). There’s a lot of advantages, like the duplicate printing issue and not having to connect the printer to another device, but the printers themselves do tend to cost a bit more. The other printer ext is likely also better integrated into some other standard extensions (like dine-in), though this one does work with all the extensions that I’ve tried so far.

martin352

cupnoodles
Thanks for getting back to me on that. You wouldn’t happen to have any examples of printed orders at all? Even with sensitive data redacted, I am interested to see what size the text is. The main concern is that it is not too small or pixelated to read. Some level of customisation in regard to layout would be desirable though not essential. For example, some clients don’t want particular fields to show. Sales tax would be one example, as a surprising number of people don’t understand what they are actually taxed on day-to-day products, and think the tax is some kind of surcharge. Or another client may ask for the total due to be quite prominent (bold/large) for their customer to see when the order is delivered.

I understand the printer default fonts, when used, is “much” faster, according to your documentation. I am just curious if that has any drawbacks? Can that be made slightly larger for example?

Thanks!

cupnoodles

I’m not near a restaurant right now and can’t generate a sample, but the layouts are saved in ReceiptLine format (https://github.com/receiptline/receiptline) which can handle different font sizes and layouts moderately well. The image/png mode obviously won’t be pixelated at all and can print at each printer’s dpi, since in this mode the server is rendering the layout and sending it to the printer as a large image file.

Let me know if you end up using the ext! It’s a bit more niche than the other one and doesn’t have many users - i’d love to get feedback or hammer out any bugs that haven’t come up for myself.

martin352

cupnoodles
Thanks.
I might just buy one of those printers and check this out.
I don’t want to ask you a bunch of questions on here, but I am guessing your extension supports the printing of sub items? Ie. options such as pizza toppings or meal deal constituents?
It’s just I was trialling another extension, which I was surprised to find did not support this.

cupnoodles

Yep - menu options can be printed. I don’t mind questions here either - the forum thread can serve as documentation that I wasn’t clear on in the extension itself.

jake453

Hi, everything seems to be setup correctly and I have debugged the poll but the printer is not sending back GET request for the job data. Any ideas, I posted in a separate thread but realised this one mentioned issues with documentation. Regards, Jake.

cupnoodles

Thanks for using the extension! You’re able to debug by looking at requests? What model of printer are you using?

If the poll is working but the GET request isn’t, I’d say it’s likely a problem with the extension or the way it’s set up. Can you do some sanity checks by

1.) Manually try to print a ticket and make sure that the job request shows up in the Print Queue (admin/cupnoodles/starcloudprnt/printqueue)
2.) Make sure that the printer configuration is set to the location that the ticket is from
3.) If the job shows up in the Print Queue, refresh the page a few times and see if it’s cycling status, going from Queue=>Notified and back. Sometimes if the printer isn’t able to print, the job will get stuck in a loop, though if you’re not seeing any GET requests then I doubt that this is the case.

jake453

Hello,

Thank you for your reply. It’s a TSP654II.

I’ve been checking via point 1. and 2., only using manual printing the moment.

I have been adding some Log:debug(); to routes file to capture the request from the printer, check the POST response.

The job is returned in the reponse when the job is at qeued status, the job then goes to notified status and I’ve been reverting this in the database to save manually generating jobs.

Is there a log you know of on the printer side? Also, perhaps multiple failed jobs before the printer was setup correctly is stored in memory and stopping the GET request, is there a clear down method on the printer?

However, I have reset back to factory defaults a number of times so this should have cleared anything of this type. Also, I have logged whether the GET route is hit at all and it is not.

Regards, Jake.

cupnoodles

Oh that actually sounds like option 3, if the job is moving from Queued to Notified. I’m not aware of any queue in the printer itself. If you wait a while and refresh, is the job moving to ‘Sent’ and then back to ‘Notified’?

Have you tried switching the printer mode between ‘image/png’ and ‘starsbcs’? I have seen this be an issue on some printer models, though not specifically the TSP654II.

jake453

I have switched to ‘image/png’ there is now a GET request coming in but it’s now looping through Queued > Notified > Sent.

When I switched back to ‘starsbcs’ it’s now seemingly looping between Queued > Notified.

Regards, Jake.

cupnoodles

Got it - seeing the GET request is definitely progress! Seeing as this might require a bit more back-and-forth than is ideal in the forum setting, are you on the Discord server? If so I have the same username over there and should be able to put some time into this today.

If not, my next debugging step would be to create a super simple layout (just a ‘Hello World’ perhaps) and see if your printer is able to print that in ‘image/png’ mode. If it’s not able to do so, then its possible that the node libraries didn’t get installed correctly on your server, leading to the GET request just sending down an error message. I will think of a good way to debug whether this is the case and post it back here shortly.

cupnoodles

Alright - if you have shell access to the server, then please navigate to <site_dir>/extensions/cupnoodles/starcloudprnt and run something like

./vendor/bin/node assets/js/receiptline_to_format.js png '{"cpl":"48","encoding":"multilingual","gradient":"1","gamma":"1.8","threshold":"128","upsideDown":"1","spacing":"1", "google_font": "Azeret Mono"}' 'Hello World'

replacing ./vendor/bin/node with your node path (as set in the extension settings). It should return a big block of encoded data, as opposed to showing an error.

cupnoodles

We figured this out over on Discord, but for anybody in the future that has the same symptoms as described above, the root cause seems to have been an incorrect node path in the extension settings.