JoexDean

Domestic Applications of Receipt Printers

I own a ZJ-5890K thermal receipt printer. Here’s how to set one up, and why you might want to.

Cost

A thermal receipt printer costs between twenty to thirty dollars. It doesn’t require any ink, just the right kind of paper.

The paper for a thermal receipt printer is quite inexpensive, although it’s important to check the required dimensions, and to purchase paper that is specifically without BPA (a known carcinogen). In English, this paper is usually sold as “thermal receipt paper”, and in Danish, “termo terminalrulle” or “bonruller”. Depending on the size of the roll and the vendor, a  20m roll of paper is a couple bucks, and lasts awhile.

Setup

I connect to the printer over USB.

From a Windows machine, the printer can be setup through the “Printers & scanners” -> “Add device” function, where it can be found under “Local printers”; it should be configured as a printer from a “Generic” manufacturer, using the “Generic / Text Only” configuration.

From my Mac, I use CUPS. I believe that this works nearly identically for Linux systems using OpenPrinting CUPS. Through the CUPS web interface, a new printer can be added under “Add Printers”, where my USB-connected printer is found as a local device titled Printer_USB_Thermal_Printer. It should be configured as a device from a “Raw” manufacturer, which allows it to print plain text. Once set up, text can be sent to the printer by piping text to lpr, e.g. cat PRINTME.md | lpr. MacOS’s default “Print” menu doesn’t recognize printers that use a text-only drivers, so any job sent to the printer will render as the raw PostScript command (wasting a lot of paper).

The manufacturer also provides a driver from their website, which I assume can broaden the printing capabilities of the device, although I haven’t tried this.

Use

In contrast to regular printers, my experience with this minimal printing setup has been that it is entirely reliable, never jamming, complaining about ink, or requiring updates from the manufacturer.

I’ve found that for most day-to-day printing tasks, a thermal receipt printer is perfectly suitable, while beating regular printers on price and reliability. The smaller paper size also fits nicely into a wallet or on a desk, which is ideal for taking small notes.

Here are some things I’ve found this printer useful for:

If this covers 80% of your printing needs, then considers picking up a receipt printer for your own desk!