I have a number of POS printers and need to automatically recognize the type of the printer. I need do it without using POS.NET or printer drivers. How can I do that?
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I have a number of POS printers and need to automatically recognize the type of the printer. I need do it without using POS.NET or printer drivers. How can I do that?
There is no standard way to recognize printers like this.
It’s difficult or impossible in the general case (printers may use different COM port configuration – baud rate etc – and different protocols). It’s complicated further by the fact that many printers can be configured in different ways by DIP switches or by sending commands.
If you have a reasonably small number of printers to recognize, for all of which you know the correct COM port configuration, you could experiment with sending commands / reading responses to find combinations that allow you to uniquely identify printers among the ones you support.
Many POS printers support variants of the ESC/POS protocol, and responses to status requests (look at each printer’s manual) may have differences that enable you to make the distinction.
Of course you will then have an ongoing maintenance headache – each time you want to support a new printer model, you are going to have to again try to find some distinguishing characteristic and update your recognition software.