So I've been on a mission this weekend, getting a Zebra belt mounted Bluetooth printer to print photo's from a mobile application.

So I built a simple test program that outputs CPCL printing commands to a Zebra MZ220 Bluetooth printer.  

My helper library wraps the CPCL command set as follows -

CPCLPrinter prn = new CPCLPrinter("COM18");
            prn.StartLabel();
            prn.PageWidth(300);
            prn.Center();
            prn.Text(0,7,0,140,114,"Hello World");
            prn.EndLabel();
          
            prn.Print();
  prn.Dispose();

So far so good.   I'm simply using the System.IO.Ports namespace to talk to the Bluetooth mapped serial port.

So next question is how to print Bitmaps.     These printers are all about reliable repeated printouts.   So catering for on the fly generated images so dynamically generating images is something a little different.

The first challenge is that these printers are black and white,  so we need a way of reducing the colour depth of our inbound Bitmap.

Next will be to convert to PCX format.

Then we'll need to send this over to the printer.

Finally we need to wrap it into a simple app. that takes a photo and starts the whole process.

Will keep you posted on progress.