Is it possible to connect an ipad to a star printer without the square stand and print receipts?

[Jiveturkeylegs1]

I have an ipad and would like to print to a star printer without using the square stand.  Can this be accomplished without a bluetooth printer?  I use it on a food truck and having the ipad in the square stand makes it difficult to constantly hold the ipad and stand outside the window for customer to tip/sign after using their card.  I've had to replace the cord that connects under the stand 3 times now.

[ryanwanner]

Hi @Jiveturkeylegs1 !

Short answer: yes and no. 🙂

Since you're in a food truck, this is going to be tough for you. If you were in a brick and mortar, I'd say find a printer that is an Ethernet based printer, then wire it to your network where your wireless router lives. That's how I run my printers in my store.

On a truck, ethernet is quite a different beast, if not almost impossible to integrate. Since your tablet (I assume) uses a cell signal to connect, it won't see any internal network. I also haven't heard of any wifi-based paper printers that are compatible with Square (I may be wrong here)

Honestly, for a food truck, I think your best bet would be to look into one of the tablet based Kitchen Display Systems like Fresh KDS. You can set up a wireless hotspot using your phone or another device then have your Square tablet and the KDS tablet be on that network. All orders will then "print" to that screen. Yeah, it means no paper receipts, but in the long run this is the best way to save you the hassle of "why isn't this working this time?"

Hope this helps!

[SmokinZBBQ]

Hi, we have a food truck also and we use the Star kitchen printer, a Samsung tablet and a router with a cell signal and it works great. Here's the one we bought because it had an ethernet port built into it.

Huawei Wi-Fi Router B310-518 Unlocked 4G LTE CPE 150 Mbps (4G LTE in USA Latin & Caribbean Bands) + ...

Huawei

 We have also used an individual hotspot (or a cellphone with a hotspot) and a small netgear router to set up a secure network. Once you have the network established the Star printer is connected directly to the router with an ethernet cable and the tablet is connected with WiFi to the router. Log in to the Square app on your tablet and set up your printer station and choose the printer settings. We use the kitchen printer to print order tickets only. We have customers sign for credit charges directly on the tablet and since it's connected via WiFi it is very portable. Square has an option to receive charge receipts by text or email and the customers seem to like this. There are times when our lines are long that we have our cashier outside the truck, or even have 2 registers running at the same time, and because they are running on Wifi and not hard wired to the printer it makes it very easy.

Hope this helps!

[Joe]

Thanks for adding these tips here, @SmokinZBBQ! Your contributions here will help many, I'm sure! 

[RangerC17]

What star printer did you use

[SmokinZBBQ]

We use the Star kitchen printer SP742ML. It connects directly to the router I listed above with an ethernet cable. 

Now we're using the Star TSP143IIU that connects directly to our tablet with a USB-to-go cord (micro usb on one side and usb port on the other for the printer to plug into). They both work great, the kitchen printer has to be connected to the router where the TSP143 works with the wifi and connects directly to the tablet.

Hope this helps!