[kflux]

hey folks,

i recently got a Star Micronics TSP600 thermal POS printer (TSP613 tear bar type with serial interface) which I am trying toget to work on my Mac via a USB to Serial adapter (PL2303 chip)

Having done some research on this topic many people simply said to buy a USB model and stop trying to get a serial printer run. I didn't like that approach, so I tried it.

I actually got to the point where my printer spits out unreadable gibberish (heureka!!!) but i don't really know why - and I might need some advice from a CUPS/POS guru or simply from someone who has successfully achieved to get such a printer to run...

here's what i did so far:

- installed open source PL2303 USB-to-Serial driver that was recommended here (seems to work, because it shows up in /dev/tty*)

- since Star Micronics doesn't provide a Mac driver for the serial TSP600, but only USB, i went on to find a CUPS PPD file for this printer - which i found in the Linux driver package for the same model (tsp613.ppd.gz)

- installed the Serial Printing Enabler from here

- went to my local CUPS settings page http://localhost:631 to "Administration" > "Add Printer"
- set name and description > next picked "PL2303-XXXXXX" (USB-to-Serial-adapter) as device
- set 9600 bps, 8 bits, no parity, DTR handshake as settings (same as my printer)
- chose the downloaded tsp613.ppd driver file for this printer
- finish

the printer showed up in CUPS and in the MacOS X printer settings as "TSP613 Tear Bar" and i tested it by printing a simple text file, but nothing at all happened...so i went back into the CUPS settings and changed the serial handshake to "none" and tried printing again - and it WORKED!!!!!!

err, the TSP600 spit out inches and inches of paper filled with lines of ASCII gibberish, but at least my Mac speaks to the printer now!

i need a hint where to continue! is it a serial settings issue or is it a CUPS driver issue? any more ideas would be highly appreciated!

thanks in advance,

flux

[Dork.]

What POS software are you using? I don't think hooking up a serial receipt printer is as simple as adding it in CUPS and using it. I think that they don't have standard interfaces at all, and your POS software has to support STAR printers in order to be able to use it.

At least, back when I set up some Star TSP600-series serial printers with POSIM POS software, I started down the road of adding CUPS drivers and all that stuff. It went nowhere, so I got rid of all that stuff, just installed the USB-to-serial driver, and POSIM was able to see it and use it. That was a few years ago, on Tiger, but I doubt anything has changed in regards to serial printing on OS X in the meantime.

Hope this helps!

[kflux]

thanks, Dork - i am not using any POS software yet, since i want to use the printer for an art project. I know that POS software can speak to the printer directly through raw data communication (Star Line or ESC/POS protocol) - but the new USB models come with a proper CUPS driver and are supposed to work like normal printers in the OS environment.

I got this to work without any problem in my Windows environment, and since there are CUPS drivers at all it *should* also work in OS X - i just don't know where i made a mistake or where i am missing something...

but thanks for your hint anyhow