Need to re-purpose Retro-Printer

[delta37]

Hi good day!

I can't seem to contact you guys on your Contact Us page on your website. It keeps asking for Captcha that I can't seem to find

Anyways I am really interested in your product but I need it modified and re-purposed.

I'm looking for a Printer Interceptor that can Digitize print jobs. Similar to what you have but instead the device (e.g. raspberry pi), will be in between a POS Machine and the Receipt Printer (modern usb Epson printers).

The idea is from the POS Machine, the print job will be sent to the device, then it will be resent to the Receipt Printer to be eventually printed.

The "intercepted" print job will then be digitized and temporarily stored in the device, after which it will eventually be sent over to a cloud storage for post-processing via internet (e.g. wifi)

Is this something that your device can do? or maybe can we re-purpose your current project for this?

Thanks, looking forward to your response.

Kind Regards,

Marion

[RWAP]

Hi Marion,

Not sure why the contact us form is not showing the captcha - it is currently working - will have to see for how long!

Where you are trying to intercept the data sent from a POS Machine to a USB printer, you actually need a different solution to our Retro-Printer. You need the RWAP Interceptor (S)

There are a few issues here:

a) The single board computer used has to support a USB-OTG port hence we have previously implemented this on the Banana Pi M1+ and Odroid C1/C1+ / C2 computers. However, we understand that the Raspberry Pi 4 should now also implement this port.

The need for this specific type of port is because the Interceptor has to read the USB parameters passed by the connected printer and basically fool the POS Machine into believing that the printer is still connected directly (without anything inbetween).

b) Generally, the key issue is ensuring that there is minimal delay between something being processed by the POS Machine and the Receipt Printer starting to print.

To overcome this, we found that the intercepted data should only be spooled on the Interceptor itself - any conversion and processing has to then be carried out on a device independent of the prining.

We have already developed and supplied the Interceptor to a couple of large busineses but they created their own custom software / routines to interpret the ESC/POS data being printed, so we do not have access to these routines (ESC/POS is very different to ESC/P2 used on non receipt printers). We would therefore have to work with you (if required) to create a bespoke conversion program - although you may be able to find an off the shelf ESC/POS convertor which runs under Windows.

I have contacted you via PM with our email address rather than posting it on here.

Rich