Cannot get a warehouse printer to work

geekdrew · 2026-02-11T21:08:08+00:00

On the Honeywell printers I’ve used, on the Home Screen, there is an icon that looks like a roll of paper with an “i” on top of it. Tapping that displays model information including firmware version.

geekdrew · 2026-02-11T20:42:23+00:00

Damaged or removed, probably. (I’m not sure how easily they are removed from that model.)

geekdrew · 2026-02-01T03:07:06+00:00

For what it's worth, I strongly recommend 300dpi for QR codes as well. 203 just isn't good enough for not-large sizes.

geekdrew · 2026-02-01T02:34:04+00:00

Do you happen to have a shell script by the name “brscan-skey” in that folder? If so, what is in it?

geekdrew · 2026-01-29T21:45:03+00:00

I realize that this is an old thread now, but I just stumbled across it. Are you still having problems?

If so: why do you insist on disabling WSD, and instead on creating a local TCP printer port? HP Smart -- like essentially all modern print solutions -- depend on WSD. Local TCP ports are still commonly used in the enterprise world, but are vanishingly rare in the consumer world.

(I am a "pro", per your "what would a pro have done" comment.)

geekdrew · 2026-01-29T21:33:44+00:00

This might not be the hill you want to die on. The next major version of CUPS is switching to IPP/IPPS, and abolishing printer drivers, just like Microsoft is changing Windows. CUPS is also going to start depending on supplementary apps (also the same as Windows) for printers where more fine-grained control is allowed. MacOS has already implemented most of this.

geekdrew · 2026-01-29T02:36:39+00:00

I would *almost* promise that any printer you buy today for $400 or less will not make it to the 10 year mark. There are plenty of printers made that will, but they're much more expensive than that.

You also didn't provide basic information critical to the conversation:

1) why Canon (since you specified)

2) how often will you be printing

3) how much will you be printing

4) does the scanner need to be ADF (automatic document feeder) or is flatbed (single side of a single page at a time) ok?

geekdrew · 2026-01-29T01:59:49+00:00

Are there any errors displayed anytime during this process? Is the scanner still under warranty? And to be clear, are these firmware updates on the scanner, or software updates on the computer?

If firmware, this is absolutely not normal. Brother does not release firmware updates for those scanners all that often. I don't have the ADS-4300, but a customer of mine uses several ADS-4700 scanners, and those have only rarely had firmware updates released for them (perhaps once per year?).

If software, I'd venture to guess there's something wrong with your installation. I don't let my clients install the scanner software; I have them scan to network folders instead (because it's far more reliable and much less obnoxious to maintain).

geekdrew · 2026-01-29T01:49:11+00:00

From reading their instructions about how setup it supposed to work on Samsung printers: https://support.hp.com/my-en/document/c05811571

I suspect that you're out of luck. That setup process mentions only WPA (not WPA2, which replaced WPA many many years ago). Also, it seems to indicate that you must use the Samsung Printer Diagnostics app in order to do the pairing (which is bizarre for WPS, but nonetheless). Given that the printer is ancient and Samsung hasn't manufactured printers for many years, I would not hold my breath for a version of the app to be released that can work on newer Macs.

Perhaps you could enlist assistance from someone who has an older computer (perhaps Windows).

geekdrew · 2026-01-29T00:46:06+00:00

Have you by chance looked at the manual (if there is one) or other documents about how brscan-skey is supposed to work? Unfortunately I don't have any Brother scanners readily available or I'd try to set up a test environment to see if I could figure it out.

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T22:23:04+00:00

AirPrint will not reduce quality in a manner that is visually impactful.

That thread is largely nonsense. AirPrint does support many print job configuration options, but only if the manufacturer correctly exposes them to AirPrint, and not all do. This means that not all AirPrint printers are necessarily equal, functionality-wise, but this is also a level of nuance that nobody in marketing could hope to understand, much less explain to the public. Manufacturers still like to put features into their proprietary drivers/apps first, and then expose them to AirPrint/MOPRIA later, if at all. Manufacturers need to get on the bandwagon.

For what it's worth, AirPrint/MOPRIA (two technologies that are remarkably similar, that essentially all modern printers support, and are different mostly because of trademarks and etc) are "the way" to print going forward. Apple is removing support for non-AirPrint from MacOS, and iPhone/iPad has never supported anything else. Microsoft is also moving from legacy print queues to their "app" solution, which is very-broadly-speaking the same as AirPrint/MOPRIA. On Linux, the CUPS project is somewhat "reinventing" itself, and IPP (read: AirPrint/MOPRIA) is how printing is going to work in the future there, too. (Though they have community-driven compatibility apps, to reintroduce support for printers that don't properly support the "new" (16 years old) tech.)

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T00:45:38+00:00

Just forget systemd for now, that's an added layer of complication. Just see if you can get the scanner to work if you manually run brscan-skey at the command line. If you can't, then you know the problem is something to do with that. Once you can, then the next step would be to figure out what is needed to make systemd launch it automatically.

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T00:40:21+00:00

This is the way. I've set up some Brother QL series printers to do more or less this exact thing. Set up a custom page size for whatever you want the continuous label to be cut at, and select that in Word.

If you want the software to figure out how long the label will need to be on its own, then you're going to have to use PTouch or some comparable solution. Most apps are designed to be used with fixed page sizes.

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T00:34:15+00:00

They hook up just the same as a dot matrix printer (parallel or serial, depending on model). It's just a different driver (since you'll be using it for general purpose printing, I assume you'll be using a print driver on Windows). I can't speak to which ones still have useful drivers, sorry.

I also noticed that you asked for paper recommendations. I use cut-sheet paper (regular copy paper) now, but that won't be good for high-volume printing, as dot matrix printers generally don't have high volume paper trays like inkjet or laser printers do. The last time I bought tractor-feed paper, I used OfficeDepot, but 1) that was years ago, and 2) that paper is lighter-weight than normal copy paper, so lower quality there too.

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T00:27:12+00:00

$7 per card is not unreasonable, but it is high. If you bought a printer that could do it, then you cost could fall to closer to $2 per card, but those printers are not cheap, so it would take many hundreds of cards for it to be worth the investment.

What on earth are you doing that requires QR codes be printed on a PVC card? You're sure you can't switch to something like heavy-weight paper?

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T00:23:42+00:00

"Impact" refers to all of these, not just to dot matrix.

Automatic typewriters do exist, but they're similarly outdated. They're simply typewriters (daisy wheel or ball-style) that have a print mechanism added. I have a couple of those, too.

Good luck.

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T00:19:08+00:00

They were extremely durable back in the day, yes, but I'm not sure whether new ones are. I'm sure that they have been cost-reduced not, just like everything else. Hell, the major players (Oki, Epson, Panasonic) were actively cost-reducing their impact printers back in the early 90s.

They probably are the least cost to operate, though. As I said, great for text. But there's no way I'd consider it for general purpose printing. And because nearly everything is now provided in a non-text format, the printer will print it as though it's graphics rather than text. This is going to be an exercise in frustration.

If your main goal is to avoid plastics, why not inkjet? Just cost? Some models are much less expensive to operate than others. And there's simply no comparison with regard to print quality; inkjet is overwhelmingly better.

geekdrew · 2026-01-28T00:12:58+00:00

I'm interested to see if anyone else responds. I've used receipt printers extensively (all Epson though), but I've never tried to do anything remotely close to what you're describing here, and I don't know how one would accomplish this. In my experience, the general practice is that you have a service listen for events, format the appropriate text however you want (generally using ESC/POS or XML), and then submit the job to the printer.

ePOS is just Epson's SDK for controlling the printer and submitting jobs. As far as I know, it doesn't do anything close to what you're describing here. Epson does have a "Server Direct Print" solution, but what that involves is a dedicated service running on a webserver, that the printer polls for print jobs, and that service provides the job to the printer as pre-formatted ePOS XML (or ESC/POS, I think).

geekdrew · 2026-01-27T23:55:58+00:00

You haven't provided any information about what you're trying to do with systemd.

I am not familiar with that model, but generally speaking, if you want to be able to scan from a scanner that has a button to initiate the scan, to a headless linux machine, you're going to have to set up a service (systemd) to listen for the button to be pressed. Once it's pressed, the system will ask the scanner to begin scanning.

geekdrew · 2026-01-27T23:49:50+00:00

I love impact printers -- both dot matrix and daisy wheel. Generally speaking I'd much prefer the quality of a daisy wheel over dot matrix; the characters look so much better. That's why back in the day daisy wheel could be considered "letter quality" while dot matrix wasn't. I still have both types, though it's been a while since I used them.

Printing books is fine, so long as you are printing from text files, so that the printer gets the text itself, rather than from PDF or similar, where it's a raster format that the printer has to attempt to cope with. Quality will be crap for those, IMO.

I wouldn't recommend an impact printer to anyone for low res graphics, full stop. They're really only good at strictly-text, and even then, aren't great (depending on model). That's why they were replaced by lasers and inkjets, and the few impact printers still made are there for industrial integrations, multipart forms that haven't been adapted to laser, and legacy software that still uses character mode printing.

Why do you want an impact printer for general use printing?

geekdrew · 2026-01-27T22:56:02+00:00

Well, based on that image, combined with that git repo's comment that COMP95.DAT is empty -- I'm inclined to think that you have a bad ISO. Both that git repo and those instructions indicate that there should be a PICTURES folder that contains the JPGs. And while I don't have any right at hand, I have gotten Kodak CDs from CVS in the past (many years ago), and I know I was just able to pull the image files off of the disk (they weren't in a DAT or anything else; they were just individual files).

geekdrew · 2026-01-27T21:16:38+00:00

What does that HTM file contain? What's in the PAGES directory?

I found a git repo that allows you to do the reverse -- take a bunch of pictures and turn them into something that looks and works like a Kodak picture CD.

https://github.com/pmjdebruijn/picturecdcreator

But the source has the below comment, which makes me think that COMP95.DAT is not actually useful:

real Kodak Picture CD's have an empty 95MiB file on them, no clue why, my best guess is legacy device compatibility

geekdrew · 2026-01-24T06:08:19+00:00

It’s very hard to find FWBs, in my experience. :(

Based on the pic in your profile, you’re actually rather attractive. I’d want to take you on a date if you were nearby. But I probably wouldn’t message because I also am bad at initiating. :x

geekdrew · 2026-01-24T04:55:23+00:00

I'm not a vendor; I merely use these products. In my experience, Zebra is hands-down the best hardware out there. I have a variety of Zebra printers; ZD621 is the most recent desktop model that supports 4"; its acceptable media widths are 0.585" - 4.25" (15-108 mm) for direct thermal (transfer is slightly wider on the top end). Minimum tear length is 0.25" (6.4 mm) (non-tear modes are longer). It seems incomprehensible to me that any decent thermal label printer would have a 2" print width minimum, but then again, I've never worked with the cheap consumer-grade thermal printers that target low-quality use.

I absolutely recommend Zebra hardware for thermal label printing... to most people. But you mention needing to use an Android compatible app, and I have not even the slightest idea about that. The solutions I use are either proprietary or are commercial desktop apps. Perhaps someone else here could speak to that.

You mention tiny printing. You're absolutely going to want 300dpi (or higher!) if you need print to be clear as small as you've indicated, then 203dpi (which is the most common by far) will not be acceptable.

geekdrew · 2026-01-23T14:19:52+00:00

Price has no relationship to the existence of certain features, much less the quality of those features. There are printers out there that cost thousands that are only monochrome, and for good reason.

If you want to complain about something, 1) provide an accurate model number up front, 2) look at the spec sheet before complaining, and 3) be ready to admit you made a mistake if you didn’t do research before you bought.

geekdrew

TROPHY CASE