Give your printer an address that never changes

Ten minutes while you are setting the printer up saves an evening of silent tickets months later. Do this once, at install, and forget about it.

Why this matters

Your kitchen printer sits on the restaurant's network, and MenuBaton sends tickets to it by its address — something like 192.168.1.50. Most routers hand those addresses out on a lease: the printer borrows one for a while, and when the lease runs out the router can give that address to something else and hand your printer a different one.

That usually happens overnight, over a holiday closure, or after someone reboots the router — which is exactly why it is confusing when it does. Nothing was touched, nobody changed a setting, and in the morning the printer is silent. If your kitchen works from printed tickets alone — Print orders for the kitchen, the setting every restaurant starts with — it stops hearing about new orders at all, and they wait unprinted on the portal's Orders page. If the kitchen screens show orders too, they just stop reaching paper.

The fix is to pin the address so it can never move. There are two ways to do it and you only need one.

Step 1 — Find the printer's IP and MAC address

You'll need the IP address for both methods, and the MAC address if you reserve it on your router. The printer will tell you both. This works on essentially every Epson and Star receipt printer:

1. Turn the printer off.
2. Hold down the FEED button, and while holding it, turn the printer on.
3. Keep holding until it starts printing, then let go.

A slip comes out with the printer's settings on it. You are looking for two things:

Keep the slip. While you are here, it is worth writing the address on a label and sticking it to the printer — Kitchen — 192.168.1.50 — so the next person does not have to repeat this.

Step 2, option A — Reserve the address on your router

Recommended. Nothing changes on the printer.

1. Open your router's admin page in a browser. The address and password are usually printed on a sticker on the router itself — commonly 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1.
2. Find the section called DHCP Reservation, Address Reservation, Static Lease or Bind IP to MAC. Router makers all name it differently; it is nearly always under DHCP or LAN settings.
3. Find the printer in the router's list of connected devices and reserve its current address. If you can't tell which device is the printer, match it using the MAC address from Step 1. Some routers ask you to type the MAC address in instead.
4. Save, then power the printer off and on so it picks up the reserved address.

That's it. The printer now gets the same address every time, forever.

Step 2, option B — Set a static IP on the printer

Use this if your router has no reservation feature.

Epson printers

Covers the TM series — TM-T88, TM-T20, TM-m30 and similar, with an Ethernet or Wi-Fi interface.

1. On a computer or tablet on the same network as the printer, type the printer's IP address from Step 1 straight into a browser's address bar.
2. The printer's configuration page opens. If it asks to sign in, try epson for both the user name and the password — that is the factory default on most TM models.
3. Go to Configuration → Network → TCP/IP.
4. Change the address method from Auto to Manual.
5. Enter your chosen IP address, the subnet mask (usually 255.255.255.0) and the default gateway (your router's address).
6. Click Submit, then reset the printer when it asks you to.

Epson also publish a free desktop tool, EpsonNet Config, which does the same job from a Windows PC if you would rather not use the browser — it finds the printer on the network, and the setting lives under TCP/IP → Basic.

Star Micronics printers

Covers TSP100III, TSP100IV, TSP650II, TSP700II, TSP800II, SP700, mC-Print and mC-Label.

1. On a computer or tablet on the same network as the printer, type the printer's IP address from Step 1 straight into a browser's address bar.
2. The printer's Network Utility page opens. Click Login and sign in with user name root and password public — the factory default.
3. Go to IP Parameters.
4. Set the address method to Static, then fill in your chosen Static IP Address, Subnet Mask (usually 255.255.255.0) and Default Gateway (your router's address).
5. Click Submit, check the summary, then click Save.
6. Choose Save → Configuration Printing → Restart device and click Execute. The printer reboots and prints a slip confirming its new address.

Step 3 — Point MenuBaton at it

Open the printing app on the computer or tablet beside the printer, and use + Add Printer. It scans your network and lists what it finds, or you can type the address in by hand. Give it a name that says where it stands — Kitchen, Bar — because that name is printed on every ticket.

Then press Test print before you walk away.

If the address changes anyway

MenuBaton is built to survive this, which is why a printer going quiet is usually a short problem rather than an evening's problem.

The first time a Windows or Mac printing computer reaches your printer, it quietly remembers which printer it is. If the printer later turns up at a different IP, that computer recognises it and corrects the address for the whole restaurant — phones included — and the tickets that were waiting come out. Usually within a couple of minutes, with nobody in the building.

When that cannot happen — no Windows or Mac machine on site, or a printer nothing has reached yet — any printing app shows a Find it again button on a printer it cannot reach. It searches the network and shows you what answered. On a computer, the printer it recognises is marked for you. On a phone, nothing can be marked, so check the address on the printer's own self-test slip before you choose: picking the wrong one sends that printer's tickets to a different machine.

If it still won't print

When the address is right and tickets still do not come out, it is almost always one of these — and all three look identical from the app, which just says it cannot reach the printer.

• The printer is on a different Wi-Fi network. A guest network is usually walled off from the main one. The printer and the printing devices must be on the same network.
• Client isolation is switched on. Sometimes called "AP isolation" or "client separation", it is a setting on many business access points that stops devices on the network talking to each other at all. It has to be off.
• The printer is out of paper, or its cover is not closed properly. Worth ruling out before anything else — it costs five seconds.

A quick way to tell a network problem from a printer problem: if + Add Printer scans and finds nothing at all while the printer is switched on, it is the network.

Still stuck?

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