Success: Print server on laser engraver

[James Terry]

I had tried two of my older HP Jetdirect print servers on my GCC Laser Pro L25 with no success. The job would send, succeed and be removed but the laser would never see anything.

I went out and picked up a newer wifi print server today and immediately had the same results which got me frustrated. Being the fixated nerd that I am, I kept messing with things on both sides to see if I could find a different result.

Finally, at a point just before giving up and taking this thing back to the store, I found a tiny port setting on the print server for speed and PJL. Modifying both of these allows the jobs to process successfully.

So the problem was not ever in the pc driver or the network, but it was simply between the print server and the laser machine. Now that I have this information, I am going to look back and see if I can enable PJL on my older print servers. And funny enough, PJL is an HP invention.

So I am here to say that I had success in networking my old laser table using a Trendnet TEW-P1PG Wifi Print Server. This model also has an ethernet port to ease configuration and to also use over the wifi if desired.

[Rodne Gold]

Thanks for the info , Im going to look into it as I have 2 design stations and 6 lasers , 3 on each station and we have to use specific stations to send to specific lasers -- would this wifi method be able to send to any of 6 lasers from any one machine or would it send the info to all the lasers simultaneously. What if the sending computer is old and has no wifi card?
Would a wireless router on the network enable wireless sending?

At home , I use squeezeboxes and a single puter for my music , my wireless router sends digital streams to the SB and the SB is attached to my DAC and music system. I have 3 SqueezeBoxes and can send em either all the same music to synchronize playback on 3 discrete systems or send em all discrete streams so each system plays different stuff - would the wireless printer server setup be able to do that?

[James Terry]

...would this wifi method be able to send to any of 6 lasers from any one machine?

Yup!

What if the sending computer is old and has no wifi card? Would a wireless router on the network enable wireless sending?

Absolutely. Same thing I'm doing. And you dont have to go wireless for them either, just use ethernet to the hub which is more reliable anyway. But yeah, in the end, regardless if wireless or wired, each device has an ip address and they can all talk.

I have 3 SqueezeBoxes and can send em either all the same music to synchronize playback on 3 discrete systems or send em all discrete streams so each system plays different stuff - would the wireless printer server setup be able to do that?

You wont be able to simulcast/broadcast a job to all, but you can send a job to each one individually, so just reprint to the right devices listed in your printer list.

I see six print servers in your future. Try one for starters.

[James Terry]

By the way, for the newer laser machines, you can also put USB devices onto a network server much like a print server. I dont know if an actual usb print server would work with the laser, but it might. Otherwise, there exist usb device servers that will network your device over ethernet or wifi. This allows you to connect across your existing network and you no longer have to be direct connected to them.

I havent yet worked with one of these, but I assume that the pc client will allow you to connect to any of the networked usb devices with a click and then it appears as if it is local. This does work with fax machines, scanners, printers, flash drives and such and should work with the usb laser.

Netgear makes the WGPS606 wireless bridge print server which supports two usb printers and also has a 4 port switch so you can plug in any additional production devices that already have ethernet. And the whole thing is a wifi bridge which will "bridge" all of those connections through your existing wifi access point so no need to wire the walls.

I love gadgets. Rodne, fly me out to your part of the world and I'll make all of this work for you. Sounds like fun.

[Mike vonBuelow]

Rodne,

Did this work for you?

[Dominik Zdyb]

James,

Had you also success in networking GCC with HP Jetdirect print server ( which model ? ) or with Trendnet print server only ?

BR
Dominik

[Scott Shepherd]

James,

Had you also success in networking GCC with HP Jetdirect print server ( which model ? ) or with Trendnet print server only ?

BR
Dominik

James might not answer, he's not logged in since 2014.