Question

Photo of Keith Bell

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USB Printer Server for Zebra Printers

4

Anyone using a wireless USB print server to make their USB Zebra printers attach to the network? What is your typical printer setups?

Something like this is what I'm looking at. Basically to make the kiosk completely wireless with an ipad and printer.  

http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-WPS510U-150Mbps-Wireless-Detachable/dp/B003CFAU0U/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1429551769&sr=1-1&keywords=wireless+print+server#Ask

  • Photo of Keith Bell

    0

    I tried several different routes but could never get any type of reliability. It would work a few weeks and be totally unresponsive other weeks. 

    I had the most luck with these in client mode.... but I couldn't get them to work consistently. I may have been doing something wrong but I felt like I had exhausted all of my resources and a professional IT guy in our church was at a loss with it as well. 

    After that I tried to use the ethernet over power option and was never able to get that to work either. 

    We ended up getting two of these.... and connected them usb to the printers. Outside of having to downgrade them to windows 8 I haven't had a problem with them yet. They flip completely over in touch screen mode and the keyboard is hidden below. We've acutally turned both of these into self checkin kiosks. 

  • Photo of Jim Michael

    2

    Keith-

    While we haven't switched our current check-in system consisting of Zebra GK420d printers over to Rock yet, we did extensive testing a few years ago when we implemented ipad-based check-in with wireless printers, so our kiosks can be mobile. We tried at least 7 different wireless USB print servers and the only one we found that performed reliably (both in terms of speed, wifi stability, and repeatability) was the Apple Airport Express. We tried DLink, ZoneNet, TrendNet, and others I can't even remember now (we also tried wifi-ethernet bridge devices... don't go there!) Most had performance issues or just would not stay reliably attached to the wifi. The Airport was the exact opposite and has been working nearly perfectly for us for about 3 years.

    I looked at the TP-LINK unit you link to and if it were me buying, I would avoid it. It is 2.4GHz only, and in this day and age I wouldn't buy anything that can't also do 5GHz 802.11n at the *worst* case, since 80211.ac is already here. Even if your current APs aren't dual band, you're gonna have to move there sooner or later as 2.4GHz is largely considered unusable these days in all but the most non-critical deployment scenarios... so probably NOT the band you want to be in for check-in. Also, at that price you're only $30 away from an Airport Express ;-) That's my .02, anyway.

     

  • Photo of Keith Bell

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    I have a Zebra GK420d printer. USB. 

  • Photo of Arran France

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    Hey Keith,

    Did you settle on anything?