For restaurants & installers
Escape the hardware tax.
Name-brand POS printers cost $275–571 because your POS insists on them, not because thermal printing is hard. A node sits between your POS and a $40–160 generic printer — and because everything runs on your own network, printing keeps working when your internet doesn't.
PN-PROTO-1 · conceptPlug in the printer. Scan the QR slip it prints. Done — no laptop, no app.
The math
What the printer premium actually costs.
Street prices, checked July 2026. The premium buys real engineering — but most of what it buys is compatibility with your POS, which is exactly the part a node replaces.
| Setup | Typical price | 3-printer store |
|---|---|---|
| Epson TM-m30III (the POS-certified pick) | $275–541 each | ~$800–1,600 |
| Generic 80mm ESC/POS thermal printer | $40–160 each | ~$120–480 |
| Generic printers + Proxy Nodes in front | generic printers ($40–160) + a node per station — price at checkout | ~$120–480 in printers + three nodes |
One dependency to check: how your POS prints. If it prints to a network printer — raw ESC/POS on port 9100 — a node answers like one, status queries included, and your POS needs zero changes. Vendor-specific cloud protocols (ePOS-XML, CloudPRNT) are in development — here's the full compatibility picture.
Outage-proof
Receipts don't need the internet. Stop letting them depend on it.
When printing routes through someone's cloud, your kitchen stops when their servers do — or when your uplink does.
Oct 20, 2025
AWS us-east-1 down ~15 hours
Restaurants on cloud-dependent POS systems couldn't operate; one owner told CNN they lost a third of a day's business.
Sep 7–8, 2023
Square down ~18 hours
Thousands of sellers couldn't take non-cash payments. Small businesses reported losing thousands of dollars each.
By design
A node doesn't care
Your POS talks to the node over your own network. Order in, ticket out — with the uplink dead, the router rebooting, or a vendor's cloud gone.
More on this: what to do when your POS stops printing during an outage →
How it deploys
A node per station, not a server room.
A node velcros to the back of the hardware it drives. Front counter, kitchen line, bar — a node per station, so one failure never takes the floor down. And the nodes find each other on your network: ask any one of them (GET /peers) and it lists the rest, with what's plugged into each.
Floor plan · one LAN, four stations
GET /peers — any node lists the whole fleet
Front counter
pn-7f3a.local
Receipt printer, with the drawer-kick pulse through the printer's RJ12 port
Kitchen line
pn-b21c.local
Kitchen printer — the node wraps and cuts tickets itself, at a measured 48 columns
Bar / takeout
pn-04de.local
Printer + barcode scanner together on one node, behind a powered USB hub
Host stand
pn-91a7.local
The old RS-232 scale or pole display nobody wants to replace (transport in development)
nodes beacon over UDP · 5 s broadcasts · a dead uplink changes nothing on this floor
Proven on hardware
Measured on real hardware, not projected.
Every number below was clocked on a real node driving real peripherals — the same firmware line (1.2.33) the Proxy Node Kit ships with.
1,012 ms
Printer bound and ready
Through a powered USB hub, with a barcode scanner bound on the same node at the same time — and a real barcode delivered end-to-end.
0.15 s
Drawer-kick pulse
Measured tap-to-kick. It was 9–24 s before firmware 1.0.9 fixed Wi-Fi power save; now it's faster than the cashier's hand.
1 QR slip
Setup without a laptop
A new node opens its own setup Wi-Fi network and prints a QR slip to join it. Type the wrong password and it self-heals back to setup in ~3 minutes.
Prices are on the kit page. Shipping and tax are added at checkout.
Does this fit your room?
Two deployments, answered with what we can actually show.
Not every kind of site is on this list, and that is deliberate: a page here has to say something the rest of this one cannot. These two do.
- Food Trucks: Printing When the Uplink Is Not ThereA truck runs on whatever hotspot it can find. What keeps printing with no uplink at all, what is only buffered and for how long, and what power will cost you.
- Many Sites: Updating Nodes Nobody Is Standing Next ToWhat one account sees across locations, how a node pulls a firmware release with nobody visiting, and the four things this cloud deliberately cannot do for you.
Guides
Plain-English guides for the back office.
No jargon, no vendor pitch dressed as advice.
- POS Not Printing When the Internet Is Down?Why cloud POS printing dies with your uplink, what the AWS and Square outages cost restaurants, and how to make receipts print offline — permanently.
- Kitchen Printer Setup: a No-Nonsense GuideSetting up a restaurant kitchen printer: thermal vs impact, Ethernet vs Wi-Fi, static IPs, routing by station, and surviving printer swaps.
- Thermal vs Impact Kitchen PrintersThermal fades in hot kitchens; impact is loud but survives grease. Which to buy per station, what each costs, and how to avoid rewiring your POS.
- Cash Drawer Kick: the ESC/POS CommandHow cash drawers really open — the ESC p pulse through the printer's RJ12 port — with the exact bytes, pin timings, and fixes when the drawer won't kick.
- Put a USB Receipt Printer on the NetworkTurn a USB-only receipt printer into a network printer: print servers, a Raspberry Pi, or a palm-size node that speaks port 9100 and reports live status.