It was between the Nelko PL70e Thermal Printer, a $79 option, and a much more expensive counterpart for over $200.
Being the thrifty person that I am, I figured that I could use technology to enhance this printer’s capabilities rather than put down even more money for a more expensive version. Let’s talk a bit about the limitations of this printer first and what I was up against:
- If you want wireless printing out of the box, you are limited to a Mac or iPhone app via Bluetooth. That means, if you want to place the thing anywhere in your home or business not connected to a computer, you cannot use the native print dialog to print out a label. The app forces you to download the label and then re-upload it again. While the app works fine, I’d prefer to be able to print as quickly as possible.
- You can also hook the printer up to your Mac, but AirPrint (seeing the printer on your network) does not work. However, by accessing the printer on your Mac, you get a native print dialog so that you can print a label out of Safari directly to the printer if you’re on a site like eBay.
- After a painstaking amount of research, the printer cannot connect to a Raspberry Pi 5 out of the box, as the drivers provided by the manufacturer are incompatible with its architecture (AMD64 vs ARM64). I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get this working in any other mode, and a recent Reddit post doing this same exact thing lead to nowhere. Getting the thermal printer working on a cheap Raspberry Pi could potentially enable it to physically move around your business or home much more easily, but until then, my solution keeps the printer in a fixed location connected to a Mac.
The first thing that I did was to hook the printer up to my Mac via the included USB cable, download and install the official driver from Nelko’s website, and test it for printing through the native print dialog. Once I confirmed it worked with a test print, I then enabled sharing in the system settings. It is important to note that, even though you enabled sharing, it wont be seen wirelessly on your network; I know, it’s really weird, but that is a huge hurdle that took me a long time to deal with. Now, you should follow the directions for AirPrint Bridge’s GitHub; it’s a bit of Terminal work, but nothing too serious. Once you get that working, try going into a note on your iPhone and printing out to the thermal printer; it should work if you are on the same wireless network as your Mac.
If, for whatever reason, AirPrint Bridge fails to see your network printer, you may need to do some finagling in CUPS to enable it as a shared device there. However, do it at your own risk, because adjusting settings that you don’t understand could really screw things up!
Let’s say that, doing everything correctly above, you’ve now exposed this non-AirPrint printer wirelessly on your network. Yes, the downside as I mentioned is that you need a dedicated Mac to connect to the printer to get this working right now. However, the Nelko printer costs $70 as of writing, and a wireless Rollo printer costs $279. I just saved you $210 + taxes on these simple directions above to get the thing working wirelessly on your network. I should also note that I do notice two printers in my print dialog, but it still works just fine.
I am working on getting AirPrint working outside the house, since mine is on my desk at home. I am looking into VPN and other solutions, but it would be great to have printing work from anywhere.