For restaurants & installers
Check your POS. Test your printer.
Proxy Node Raw connects a supported USB ESC/POS receipt printer to software on your local Wi-Fi. Your POS must allow a manually configured raw network printer. Start with one test station: no commercial POS integration has been qualified, and the board needs suitable power, cabling and protection before use in a working restaurant.
Proxy Node Raw · illustrationProxy Node Raw, a bare board. Join its setup Wi-Fi from your phone; with a printer attached it also prints a QR slip to join it.
Before you buy
Three checks before changing a working station.
A printer's brand name or an advertised discovery identity does not prove compatibility. Check the actual connection and print protocol first.
- Check the POS settings. It must accept a manually entered printer address and raw ESC/POS on port 9100, or you need an integrator using the HTTP API. A vendor-certified printer list is not bypassed by adding a node.
- Identify the exact printer. Record its model, USB interface and command set. StarPRNT-only and label printers are not yet supported. A CloudPRNT client is in development, implemented in firmware source but not yet in a released firmware image, and does not replace a CloudPRNT printer today. Check the tested hardware and limits.
- Test one complete station. Include receipt layout, cuts, paper-out recovery and a router restart. Drawer pulses on the raw print port are blocked; a drawer needs the separate HTTP endpoint and an integration that calls it. Read the supported integration recipe.
Budget for the board, printer, power, cables, any powered hub, physical protection and integration work. Current board availability and pricing are on the Proxy Node Raw page.
Local printing
Know what an internet outage will interrupt.
The node's local print path does not need internet access. Your POS may still need its own cloud service to accept orders, process payments or create a print job. Test its offline behavior before relying on it.
Internet unavailable
Local printing can continue if your POS still creates jobs and the node, printer and local network remain available.
Router or Wi-Fi unavailable
The POS cannot reach the node. Restore the local network and inspect job status before retrying, so you do not print duplicate tickets.
POS cloud unavailable
The node cannot restore order entry or payment services. Follow your POS provider's offline procedure and test it before service.
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 sits beside the hardware it drives. It is a bare board; no mount or enclosure is included. Each station has its own node, but stations still depend on shared Wi-Fi, power and POS infrastructure. The diagram below is a possible layout to evaluate, not a qualified restaurant deployment.
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
A station that needs a wired connection, 5 GHz Wi-Fi or several USB devices is what Station Hub, on presale is for.
Proven on hardware
Measured on real hardware, not projected.
Every number below was clocked on a real node driving real peripherals. Proxy Node Raw units ship with Nodeware 1.2.55 or later.
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, with a printer attached, 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 Proxy Node Raw 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 Without an UplinkA truck runs on whatever hotspot it can find. What keeps printing with no uplink, what is only buffered and for how long, and what power will cost you.
- Many Sites: Updating Nodes Nobody VisitsWhat one account sees across locations, how a node pulls a firmware release with nobody visiting, and the four things this cloud deliberately won't do.
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.