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.
- This approach can be more “standard” if you have a label printer setup as a print queue on the gateway. You can use the
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.