Epson 220 Printer Not Responding to Aloha 6.2

[thatconsultantguy]

Small operation running aloha 6.2 switched to hand written tickets for a few months. Now they are ready to begin using system to generate kitchen chits. Test page prints fine on kitchen printer when connected from serial interface to jack via blue cat5. Orders do not print at all. If the kitchen printer (named Hot in maintenance, hardware, printers ) is connected to the cat 5 running to either thermal Epson TM88 it functions perfectly fine to print guest checks and credit card slips. If the printer Hot is rerouted to Terminal 1 or 2 the kitchen chits for the entire day begin printing from the first order of the day and on and on. The Aloha system is sending the kitchen chits out to print but they are never arriving at the remote connection in the kitchen. If the orders are rerouted to terminal 1 or 2 they print perfectly fine on either the Epson thermal prints or the Epson impact U220. Obviously this not an issue were a selection is incorrectly checked or flagged in the system or hardware setup ??? Correct ??? I believe that there must be some corruption in the cat5 line from terminal 2 that runs under a floor drop and to the jack box on kitchen wall ??? Any ideas or any way to attempt to force a print from either FOH terminal or the BOH PC to the kitchen printer ??? All ideas appreciated. Running out of ideas for my client. Thank You

 

[alohaakamai3]

You've done your troubleshooting properly and you know the printer itself is good and the software configuration is good at least in terms of that the tickets are supposed to print to the kitchen (this verifies nothing about the settings on the software end of the kitchen printer, however).

What I would try if you haven't done it yet, just to keep things simple here- physically take the kitchen printer over the terminal it's supposed to be running from. I'm going to make some assumptions here- that you've got RJ45 to serial adapters on the back of the terminal and the back of the printer, and that you have two patch cables in use from where the wiring for the kitchen printer is terminated at the wall (one running from the terminal to the wall and one running from the wall to the printer).

Using the patch cables (one at time, obviously), connect the printer directly to the terminal and try to print.
Also, sometimes the error message is helpful. "Offline" usually means it doesn't see it at all, "Not communicating" usually means it see's the printer, but there's something wrong.

If it works, that means your adapters, com port, settings, patch cables and printer are all good. The problem is then definitely in the wiring and usually where termination takes place (that's usually where cable runs go bad).