Printing from an embedded system

Question

We are making a lab instrument using an ARM9/RTOS system. The client has asked about printing simple reports from the ARM9 system. In this case, we have USB Host support in the RTOS. I'm thinking about printing bitmaps in generic PCL, hoping that will cover the widest range of printers. Is there a better way to approach this? I'm assuming the RTOS does not have printer drivers, and I don't want to support a lot of printers.

We also support USB device mode on our system, so you could plug in a photo printer, and our device would appear to be a USB stick. So that would work, but it's a bit clunky. This will be a C/C++ embedded system

Answer 1

Pretending to be a digital camera and interfacing with a PictBridge printer actually sounds pretty clever. It would remove the need to deal with different printer drivers, and if my understanding of the technology is correct, you could even control the operation of the printer right from your device.

On the other hand, as someone who has used a fair number of computerized lab instruments (oscilloscopes etc.) I find the ability to save screenshots from an ethernet/web interface to be much more useful. Print is dead.

Answer 2

Have you looked at what all the scope vendors are doing? They all have print options (I think) and I don't know what they are doing to solve this problem.

Last time I was involved with something like this, we used serial ports to talk to HP printers using PCL. That backfired as everyone quickly stopped making serial printers!