Kitchen printer - Printing half the ticket

[JohnS]

It's not a hardware issue. It is the Kitchen Printer Template that is the problem.
The fact that its not cutting means that it is receiving data that it cannot process and stops.
Which means that its a language / character set issue.

Move the Date/Time to the bottom.
Remove any unnecessary formatting lines to test.
Get back to a very basic setup an then add formatting to the template.

[Hugove]

OK, I have now setup the Character set to: 437 and moved the time and datee to the bottom, so far so good.

[JohnS]

Hugo,

So far so good?

[Stelzi79]

Have you tried the built in PrintingTemplate instead of yours?

[Hugove]

Hi All,

I have been away for a break in Portugal only to return to the same problem, only now it seems to be narrowed down to when there are power outages. In this area it happens 2-3 times a week. Printing a test page somehow resets it and it works again - a workaround for the time being but still really annoying.

Does anyone know "From a tech point of view" why this could be happening and if there is an obvious fix? I have thought about maybe a script that sends a test print to the printer on restart but still this would not root out the problem only another workaround.

Any ideas?

Ta

Hugo

[Hugove]

@Stelzi79 - The template is the built in one, the problem occurred prior to any changes made, however I believe that John has helped with moving the time and date to the bottom and changing the character set. It is now less intermittent but reoccurs when there are power failures which seems to be constant problem here. investing in a UPS is a good idea however there is something not right here and I need to find out what it is.

Appreciate your help and input.

Regards

Hugo

[JohnS]

Hugo,

Funny would should mention this. One of my sites had an issue where the printer refused to work. I got them to power cycle the printer and it started printing the reports.
I think a UPS may be a good idea. Power can do weird things to computers.

After a power failure is it doing the same thing and stopping at the Date/Time ?

[lemmings]

Hugo

I agree with John if you are having that many power outages I would definately consider a UPS, just to give you the time to shutdown each terminal safely, otherwise one day they will not restart due to corrupt data.

With regards to your shared printer as far as Iam comcerned its classic windows sharing issues. I had a similar setup to yours at home so the printer could be used by all and I always had issues with printing.

I eventually bought a wireless printer !!

When PCs are first started it takes longer to discover shared devices in a workgroup than it would if a shared device was using TCP/IP (Networked).

I would suggest getting a USB to Ethernet print server - thats how I set up my Epson TM.

Well I hope this helps

[rvandam]

I had an issue with two Epson TM-T88III serial printers (connected by a serial to usb adapter). The setup worked fine for about half a year, but when the high season started we got more and more problems. We got half printed tickets, and delayed tickets. On busy times tickets came out in the kitchen with an half hour delay...

I tried everything cables, drivers etc. etc. nothing worked.

My assumption was that serial printing was too slow, and I replaced one serial printer for a network ticket printer.

I still had the same problems until I connected the serial printer to the second serial port. Some old tickets came out, and since then everything works as it should.

I think that you have similar problems. I is worth to look for a network tcp to parallel adapter.

[JohnS]

I have found more recently that some problems have been due to the Windows Homegroup. Since I have gone back to traditional Windows networking things have been a lot better.

[Hugove]

@rvandam - I dont use serial printers, all my connections are parallel or USB or Parallel to USB. When you say: "I is worth to look for a network tcp to parallel adapter" is this an adapter that converts parallel to CAT5/6 RJ 45 ?

Just to update you all and for those who might suffer a similar strange problem, things are working OK now but using workarounds. Here goes:

As the printer got knocked off by power failures computer restarts etc and would only come back online when a test print was sent to it I wrote a script that on automatically sends a test print to the printer when the computer/windows starts up. I used windows task scheduler to execute the following script:

RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL,PrintUIEntry /n"kp" /k

Its been a month with no real problems, but not the way I would like it to be.

@JohnS When you say "Windows networking" how is that different to homegroups etc?

Thanks

[JohnS]

Homegroups was introduced in Vista. It was a simplified way to share resources. But as with most things about Vista, it didn't behave fully as expected. Homegroups is built on top of Windows Networking.

In Win7 it got better, but was still problematic.

With Windows Networking, if you have mapped network drives, and restart a computer, you will more often then not get a message that "There are disconnected network drives" or something similar. This is because Windows has not opened any files from that share and therefore thinks it's not there, but when you click on the drive, it's connected. Homegroup will see this as an issue and that's when things stop working properly.

The way I setup printer sharing means I don't even need the printer drivers locally installed for a computer to use a remote printer. Yes the computer that shares the printer will need the drivers loaded, but then all computers will print to it by using a share name like "\\POS01-PC\RECEIPT".

Now there is a little more to it than that, like turning off some security around sharing, but I almost never experience any issues with printing. In fact I have one site that has been running for over 18mths without any printing issues and all their terminals (which have USB printers) run off wifi, and with the Kitchen Printer running ethernet. They have blackouts, and even renovations more recently and have had no issues at all.

I am currently working on a setup guide to help people setup SambaPOS from scratch on a server, with physical terminals, Windows tablets and RDP clients (iPad, iPhone, etc) all using shared printers. This will fully cover the printer setup and sharing.

[Hugove]

John,

Thanks again, Would really like a copy of that. Do you suggest not using home groups at all? does this then mean that we need to create dedicated ip addresses to each terminal?

Things have been OK since the workaround but thinking about migrating to V3, I read that there is no tool available for this. I guess the tables structures of V3 is very different?

Let me know

regards

Hugo 

[JohnS]

I don't use Home Groups at all. I only use static IP's on servers, you can use DHCP for the rest and share by their NetBIOS name, ie POS01-PC

Yes, the DB's are very different. I have looked at creating a migration tool, and it is a big job.