Zebra Technologies USB Printer Not Showing in NI VISA Resource Name

[nithya200]

Hello NI Community,

I'm currently facing an issue with a Zebra Technologies USB printer that's connected to my system. Unfortunately, the device is not appearing in NI MAX as a VISA resource, which is preventing me from communicating with it via LabVIEW.

Details:

• The printer is recognized by my operating system and functions normally outside of NI MAX.
• I have installed the appropriate Zebra drivers, but the VISA resource name still does not appear.
• I haven't verified if other USB devices are detected in NI MAX.

[santo_13]

Not all USB devices show up in NI MAX, only COM port compliant VISA resources appear. Do you know if the printer shows up as COM port?

[nithya200]

Thankyou for your reply. The Printer shows under the Printer and USB devices and not under the COM port.

Set Up Communication With USB Instrument - NI

can we follow the above link ??

[rolfk]

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@nithya200 wrote:

Thankyou for your reply. The Printer shows under the Printer and USB devices and not under the COM port.

Set Up Communication With USB Instrument - NI

can we follow the above link ??

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That's not recommended to do! This would setup an USB-RAW VISA device and that would mean you need to program on the low level USB protocol level. Here you have to setup the correct endpoints each time before communicating with the device, and know the exact binary data structure of the various elements. It's not just sending string commands but various binary data structures and reading the according binary data structure responses.

Your device may or may not implement the standard USB Printer subclass device, which would require you to implement this part: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbprint11a021811.pdf. You could implement this protocol on VISA but it is not trivial at all. 

It could also implement its own Zebra specific proprietary protocol and integrate it in Windows as a printer device through a Zebra provided Windows driver. In this case you can only interface to it through VISA RAW if you get the exact protocol specification from Zebra, which is highly unlikely that they will send you that, mainly because they do not have any resources to support external developers with that.

There are however other ways and you should search on this forum and over on lavag.org. Mark Yedinak used to work at Zebra and was an active person here on the forums, supporting Zebra users with recommendations and ideas. He is however not at Zebra anymore and you will have to do with what has been posted in the past. It is still a lot.