Mobile Printer with Perspective

Ignition
1

I’m wondering if anyone has found a way to have a print labels from a Perspective project. I want to find a way to have an operator fill out a form in Perspective, have that form printed out and put with the product. This would be a mobile application, and I don’t see a good way to make it stationary.

Has anyone come across something that might work?

2

You can print webpages from phones, its an option under “Share” (atleast in android chrome)
Not the best but probaly good enough for a simple form

3

Ya, I thought about that, but I’m really wanting to format the page that gets printed (along with things like a barcode, etc. that get added on). I’m also looking to see if people have found handheld devices that can do this. I’ve done some searching on my own, but surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a big market for handheld computers that have printers built-in.

4

There’s not any way to have Perspective print locally other than a browser print started by the user. If the mobile device exposes a network printer service, perhaps the gateway could print directly to it (via system.report.executeAndDistribute() or some custom equivalent).

1 Like
5

We use zebra label printers and print from Perspective all the time.

You have a roads to go down:

  • Label Software acting as “middlewear”
    • We use label design and management software from NiceLabel. They make a nice product, but it is an investment. Their software manages all the label design. They also provide an automation engine so we stand up an HTTP endpoint and Ignition sends over JSON data to trigger the label to print. Really infinite architecture possibilities here…
  • Native Printing to Printers
    • If you search the forum for “ZPL” or “Zebra” or “Sato” you will find some posts related to label printing. Most industrial label printer have their own commands and language. For zebra that is ZPL, you can open up a socket to port 9100 (http options too) and drop in the ZPL template/code to print a label. From perspective, you just create a button for in the UI that executes the script to print the labels.
  • Reports Module
    • This approach can be more “standard” if you have a label printer setup as a print queue on the gateway. You can use the system.report.* functions to print the report to the printer. I absolutely despise print queues so I avoid this option at all costs and prefer to print direct to the printer rather than relying on the configuration of the print queue. I have also done a “hybrid” approach by getting the PNG output of a report then using the Zebra Java API in Ignition sending the image data direct to a zebra label printer.

There isn’t much market for devices with built in printer because they have very different lifecycles, printers tend to be in service a lot longer than mobile devices.

6 Likes
6

Awesome, thanks for the ideas! I would kind of expecting the need for some sort of middlewear. I was really hoping for a better handheld option, but I might be out of luck on that end.

7

i googled “label printer” and i seem to see alot of small printers which seem to be able to be hold.
Many with a keyboard…

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“barcode handheld printer” also seem to have some options
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8

Agreed, I found those too, but I was under the impression that I had to find something that the Perspective app could run on (i.e. iPhone or Android phone). With Ryan’s suggestions though, I think I can start expanding my search to more generic label printers.