Hello everyone!
this post concerns an EPSON TM-T88III printer which I am not able to print on. The connection works upon a usbserial interface using the PL2303 serial port driver (as shows the lsusb output posted below in the environment details).
configured with cups' web interface and Linux Dotmatrix Foomatic/epson driver, i manage to get a beep on the serial connector at the other end of my usb adapter.
I have tried many tutorials and researched through web, i must have clicked and flown over at least a hundred threads in the last two days .. all this kind of helped me a lot as saturday i didn't know anything about /dev/ttyUSB0 and now I know it is used in cups' URI thus means it should represent my printer's "display" .. though a simple 'echo "HELLO\x0D" > /dev/ttyUSB0' gives me not even the beep.
This post might get a little long as my problem is pretty complex and I have fixed myself up to one last problem: PRINTING
I mean... I HEAR MY DATA! this is really frustrating as I kind of realize something is blocking on the printer's side.
Though, the printer has been tested in my presence on a cash drawer and works perfectly with a serial to ethernet cable which plugs into the cash drawer touch screen.
I am using a serial to usb as I developed an application and basically want to print browser contents to this ticket printer.
There seems to be a lot of people researching about my single printer model "TM-T88iii" though no one seems to have the real answer to it ..
I have also tried a pySerial implementation, a C++ serial printer application but no printing and, when i coded or compiled from the web, no beep.
Beep happens when printing using cups, such as web browser print or test page print.
I tried installing multiple drivers from Epson, first of course the TM-T88iii driver they provide on the Epson website.
I have also downloaded and successfully installed the POSMicro Linux drivers for TMT through cups, though nothing happened doing this.
What else ..
I am able to print a self test page from the ticket printer buttons (power off > power on + FEED) and get the settings that should be set such as baudrate, stopbits, etc. (i will post all details underneath the problem)
on the cups interface:
As i tell you, i tried installing the printer a billion times using cups' [i must say handy] web interface, though all settings failed, no setting printed anything, and the best i got is sound on the serial port. now.. maybe there is a data encoding standard i don't get which makes data receival fail, maybe [i just read 'Buffer capacity: 4K bytes' but don't know what i could do about that] my data is sent in the wrong way (sending tickets as ASCII and simple "HELLO\x0D" and "HELLO" files tried as well..).
I am out of ideas right now and probably will edit my post with more facts and analyses i have done...
Here is more about my environment and settings:
Here is the output of "cat /var/log/cups/error_log" :
[too long, would massacre post readability..]
http://pastebin.com/ELRxsNEa
i also tried things with minicom, and installed libgnomeprint, nothing to do with it ... with minicom i must assume i am not able to understand which part of the program i could possibly use to test my printer here..
NO /dev/usb/ available, nor /dev/lp0, guess this has to do with the cups updates as mention multiple forum threads. Though, many people seem to tell 'echo "hello" > /dev/ttyUSB0' should have the exact same effect, which i cannot achieve to produce ..
i found one more thing referencing the adapter ..
Didn't find anything about the printer except after adding it through the cups interface
Ok got more interesting data:
Even More Data late late in the evening:
Might have gotten a bit unorganized, though all my problem is listed in here now, PLEASE; really, PLEASE someone share his / her knowledge and help me troubleshoot that ..
i'm out of power now ^^
peace
this post concerns an EPSON TM-T88III printer which I am not able to print on. The connection works upon a usbserial interface using the PL2303 serial port driver (as shows the lsusb output posted below in the environment details).
configured with cups' web interface and Linux Dotmatrix Foomatic/epson driver, i manage to get a beep on the serial connector at the other end of my usb adapter.
- from this i am able to tell that data is sent through the usbserial adapter but kind of gets stuck at the door of the printer if i may metaphorize..
- More details.. I get multiple beeps of different lengths on the connector when printing a self test page, which on such a ticket printer results in printing [A-Za-z0-9] and some crappy characters mixed multiple times.. (ticket length of approximately 200 dollar in a food market [=long])
I have tried many tutorials and researched through web, i must have clicked and flown over at least a hundred threads in the last two days .. all this kind of helped me a lot as saturday i didn't know anything about /dev/ttyUSB0 and now I know it is used in cups' URI thus means it should represent my printer's "display" .. though a simple 'echo "HELLO\x0D" > /dev/ttyUSB0' gives me not even the beep.
This post might get a little long as my problem is pretty complex and I have fixed myself up to one last problem: PRINTING
I mean... I HEAR MY DATA! this is really frustrating as I kind of realize something is blocking on the printer's side.
Though, the printer has been tested in my presence on a cash drawer and works perfectly with a serial to ethernet cable which plugs into the cash drawer touch screen.
I am using a serial to usb as I developed an application and basically want to print browser contents to this ticket printer.
There seems to be a lot of people researching about my single printer model "TM-T88iii" though no one seems to have the real answer to it ..
I have also tried a pySerial implementation, a C++ serial printer application but no printing and, when i coded or compiled from the web, no beep.
Beep happens when printing using cups, such as web browser print or test page print.
I tried installing multiple drivers from Epson, first of course the TM-T88iii driver they provide on the Epson website.
I have also downloaded and successfully installed the POSMicro Linux drivers for TMT through cups, though nothing happened doing this.
What else ..
I am able to print a self test page from the ticket printer buttons (power off > power on + FEED) and get the settings that should be set such as baudrate, stopbits, etc. (i will post all details underneath the problem)
on the cups interface:
- Manage Printers > add printer
- When configuring the printer, options are set automatically, such as baud rate etc. and most of them correspond (but probably are defaulted to..) to the printer's settings values.
- As soon as the printer is added, i am able to produce that beep i am so glad to hear (as it means the adapter kind of works.. [and i have the insurance that the printer works as well; maybe, though, i will have to find another communication setting..])
- I have tested multiple combinations of drivers / printer options but none could print out to my ticket printer, i have also tried using several drivers from the web such as the PPD files provided directly from the EPSON support website for my printer.
As i tell you, i tried installing the printer a billion times using cups' [i must say handy] web interface, though all settings failed, no setting printed anything, and the best i got is sound on the serial port. now.. maybe there is a data encoding standard i don't get which makes data receival fail, maybe [i just read 'Buffer capacity: 4K bytes' but don't know what i could do about that] my data is sent in the wrong way (sending tickets as ASCII and simple "HELLO\x0D" and "HELLO" files tried as well..).
I am out of ideas right now and probably will edit my post with more facts and analyses i have done...
Here is more about my environment and settings:
Code:
epsontmt printer configuration on cups' web interface :
-------------------------------------------------------------
Description:
ticket
Location:
cuisine
Driver:
Epson Dot Matrix Foomatic/epson (grayscale, 2-sided printing)
Connection:
serial:/dev/ttyUSB0?baud=9600+bits=8+parity=none+flow=soft
Defaults:
job-sheets=none, none media=na_letter_8.5x11in sides=one-sided
Code:
$ uname -a
Linux greg-laptop 3.5.0-26-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 8 23:20:06 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i686 GNU/LinuxCode:
$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 04f2:b083 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 03f0:171d Hewlett-Packard Bluetooth 2.0 Interface [Broadcom BCM2045]
Bus 006 Device 013: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub[too long, would massacre post readability..]
http://pastebin.com/ELRxsNEa
Code:
$ modprobe -l | grep usbserial
kernel/drivers/usb/serial/usbserial.ko
$ modprobe -l | grep pl2303
kernel/drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.koCode:
$ ll /dev/ttyUSB*
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188, 0 Mar 25 23:53 /dev/ttyUSB0NO /dev/usb/ available, nor /dev/lp0, guess this has to do with the cups updates as mention multiple forum threads. Though, many people seem to tell 'echo "hello" > /dev/ttyUSB0' should have the exact same effect, which i cannot achieve to produce ..
i found one more thing referencing the adapter ..
Code:
$ ll /dev/serial/by-id/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 Mar 25 21:45 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 80 Mar 25 21:45 ../
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Mar 25 21:45 usb-Prolific_Technology_Inc._USB-Serial_Controller-if00-port0 -> ../../ttyUSB0Code:
$ lpstat -p -d epsontmt
printer epsontmt is idle. enabled since Tue 26 Mar 2013 12:04:26 AM CET
printer MFC-235C disabled since Sun 24 Mar 2013 03:54:50 PM CET -
Unplugged or turned off
system default destination: epsontmt- on the cups web interface in the manage printers part of my epsontmt printer i can choose to "Clean Print Heads" which results in a stopped job (automatic) with an error message of "invalid printer command 'Clean'" This i all get from the cups web interface
- using the same menu i may "Print Self Test Page" which results only in [a eureka feeling-like] beep and "printer job completed" message on the cups web interface (no printing occured, i got all notifications from cups though on my system.. "Printing Self Test Page" "Print Completed" ...)
- same menu again "Print Test Page" which results in a much longer beep [heart stopped beating long] (job started at 12:15:49 and finished at 12:16:39 beeps almost a minute)
Even More Data late late in the evening:
- when i unplug my printer, then print something, i get a Held job with message "unable to open serial port: No such file or directory" from the cups web interface
- when i plug it back in i am now able to "Release the job" on the cups interface and that gives me a gnome notification with "Print error: epsontmt connecting-to-device" and after the held job is release, the test page is sent back to the printer again (now it works and i get the beep again as the pritner is connected
- interesting bottom fact: when i turn off the printer but leave it connected through usb; i get no beep. When i turn it back on, the serial connector starts beeping again. Isn't it obvious that my printer is recognized but ignoring my data ? Somehow i have a feeling of data problem, maybe i send to big data blocks ? how could i change that ?
Might have gotten a bit unorganized, though all my problem is listed in here now, PLEASE; really, PLEASE someone share his / her knowledge and help me troubleshoot that ..
i'm out of power now ^^
peace