MacOS app which allows drag and drop of images to BLE thermal printers

Just tried this and it works! Thanks for making this.

One request would be to have the printer spool more paper after printing so that the bottom of the image is not cut off and there is some whitespace between print jobs. Thanks.

Steps to replicate:

Power up the printer. The printer is flashing a blue LED. When I run the app (from the binary in the zip file), and click on Connect, nothing happens:

I am using: Cat thermal printer "MINI Printer", which registers as bluetooth name "MX06" using the official Fun Print iOS app MacBook Pro M1 running MacOS 12.4

Any advice for fault finding appreciated

Debug fails with

2022-11-17 22:08:09.379362+0100 Print2BLE[76575:1578471] *** Assertion failure in _NSTrackingAreaViewHelper *trackingAreaHelper(NSView *)(), winTrackingAreas.m:168 2022-11-17 22:08:09.379625+0100 Print2BLE[76575:1578471] Failed to set (contentViewController) user defined inspected property on (NSWindow): _trackingAreaHelper not allocated yet!

I am discovering XCode and ObjectiveC and can only report.

Maybe it makes sense to create a link with (affiliate) links to buy a printer so that users can buy them directly from the project and maybe support it?

Thanks for adding the feed button, going to try it out now.

Rather than commit the binary/zip to the repo, it might be a good idea to have it on the Releases page instead.

Would it be possible to make this app (or a version of it) compatible with 10.14 (Mojave)? I tried using xcode to export it to other versions but it just gives me errors like these:

/Applications/peripage/Print2BLE/Print2BLE/ViewController.m:46:5: Expression result unused

/Applications/peripage/Print2BLE/Print2BLE/MyBLE.m:112:30: Sending 'MyBLE *const __strong' to parameter of incompatible type 'id<CBPeripheralDelegate> _Nullable'

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreBluetooth.framework/Headers/CBPeripheral.h:62:63: Passing argument to parameter 'delegate' here

My device (GOOJPRT) announces itself as "MTP-II" instead of "MTP-2" and is thus not picked up by the macOS application.

Is there anything I missed to select this device?

From other repositories for Peripage bluetooth projects, they said the Peripage printer use RFCOMM SPP protocol to send and receive data. But this project uses BLE which is totally different.

1. If Peripage uses BLE for communication between Peripheral and Central, I think it can be used in iOS project?
2. Will it be possible to support Paperang Printer?

Could you add support for the "Jooheli" Brand printer? It identifies as "SB200" over Bluetooth and under Systeminformation it shows the following Informations:

SB200: Adresse: 00:1D:DF:70:4C:CB Hersteller-ID: 0x0057 Produkt-ID: 0x0005 Firmwareversion: 0.0.7 Minor Type: GenericAudioVideo RSSI: -80 Dienste: 0x800018 < AVRCP A2DP ACL >

thanks in advance :)

On a GB03 printer (PR #7) everything appears to be OK, but the prints are too "short" - only about ~20% of the image (vertically) is printed. Unclear whether this is something to do with the height calculation - the preview image shows up correctly in the window after being dropped in.

I have a Royal PT-300 receipt printer, which supports both Classic Bluetooth and BLE. In order to make BLE work, I had to connect to the printer in setup mode and set the printer to "label mode". Once I did that, the printer started broadcasting as Printer_{first 4 hex of MAC address} i.e. Printer_AAAA. I added Printer_ to the list of valid printer names, and I was able to print images from my Mac using your library without any issues, so adding Printer_ to this list should be an easy way to add support for the Royal PT-300.

One thing I noticed is with larger images, I saw some buffer overrun issues. One image printed with part of it sheared off, and another printed garbled text. This usually happens when the source device's buffer is overwhelmed or when some data is written to the stream but is lost, which results in the printer's ESC/POS commands getting offset. I wonder if there's some issue with the BLE implementation where it's losing bits somewhere, or if this is specific to my printer (and likely a buffering issue)? I don't see the same issue using my library ESCPOS_NET and printing over WiFi to the printer, but the WiFi chip and the BLE chip may have different buffer sizes or something.