raspberry pi (armhf) printing

Question

i migrated my installation of point of sales (basically generic keyboard mouse i/o) from old e2200 pc to raspberry pi. everything going smooth until the driver of the printer cannot be installed as the architecture doesn't match (armhf instead of x86/x64)

is there a way to get the printer to work? like direct print or something? i use tm u220 series impact printer.

here's some diagnostics so far:

1. tried to force the filter/ppd of the cups but it didn't work.
2. echo test >/dev/usb/lp0 this print one line text on the printer

Answer 1

If the printer successfully prints plain text sent directly to the device then you can use it as a plain text (non-graphical) printer.

You may need to filter the POS output through some software to ensure that the printer receives both carriage returns and linefeeds at the end of line.

If your POS application expects to be able to perform graphical printing, barcodes etc, you may need to port the driver.

The printer you mention does not seem to support any of the well-know page description languages (Postscript, PCL5, ESC/P, Proprinter, etc) so it may need a specific driver to perform rasterisation for anything other than plain text output.

The primary print system on the Raspberry-pi under Raspbian is CUPS - which has to be installed separately. You may be able to configure your printer as a dumb printer. You would need to do this if your POS application expects to interact with the platform's print system through the services that CUPS provides.

If the POS application passes output through the lp command, you might be able to ignore CUPS etc and create an lp script that does what you want.