Thermal Printer is a special type of printers which is not usually used at home. Rather it is vastly used for printing bills, payment receipt at Shop, Restaurant, CSC (common service centre) , Super Market cash counter, Government Departments like Transport (to generate Receipt), Electricity (to generate Spot bills), and Tourism etc.
Typically Thermal Printer comes in the market with 2-inch and 3-inch configuration. Here 2-inch and 3-inch specifies the size of Thermal Paper. This printer comes with Bluetooth or WIFI or USB connectivity. But Bluetooth Thermal Printer is being hugely used in the market. Later in the successive posts, I’ll use the term Bluetooth Thermal Printer.
Thermal Printer comes with its application software for user and SDK for developer. User can print texts, Barcodes, QR Codes and images from Mobile App via Bluetooth or WIFI. User can also place order to seller for special customization of printer’s software according to his requirement.
SDK (Standard development kit) is actually the API provided by Thermal Printer’s company where user can use this SDK for his development purpose to print.
ESC/POS Commands are Universal Commands (developed by EPSON) which 99.99% Thermal printer supports. User does not need any SDK. User can only use this ESC/POS commands in his development to print texts, Bar codes, QR Codes and images directly to the Thermal Printer. Later I have elaborately described and shown full codes using ESC/POS command how to print to Bluetooth Thermal Printer.
How does Thermal Printer work:-
This Printer does not use any Ink; rather it works with only Thermal Paper. This Thermal Paper is special type of Papers which is coated with solid state mixture of dye. There is different type of dyes available for color printing. But mostly Black printing is supported by Thermal Paper.
When this Printer starts working, its print-head gets heated up and presses on Thermal Paper. When the heat exceeds the melting point of the solid-state mixture of dye in Thermal Paper then this dye turns melted and color gets black. This is the way that texts, Bar codes, QR Codes and images are printed on Thermal Paper by Thermal Printer.
Please go to the next successive posts for further details.