Route tickets across multiple printers

Also known as: multi-printer, varias impresoras, kitchen printer / bar printer, ESC/POS bridge, destino de impresión, printer routing.

Once you have more than one thermal printer in the venue — a bar printer, a hot-kitchen printer, a pizza-station printer, or a separate till printer — you need brasio to decide which printer gets which ticket. That is what the ESC/POS bridge and category destinations do.

What you need first

This article assumes:

• The brasio print bridge daemon (brasio-print-bridge) is installed on a computer on the venue's LAN.
• A Token del bridge has been generated at Admin → Impresoras.
• Each physical printer is registered as a row in the printers table.

If any of those is missing, complete Connect your thermal printer Part B first. Multi-printer routing is the second step in that flow.

How routing works

There are two kinds of jobs:

• Receipts and pre-bills (cuenta provisional) — always go to the default printer (the one with Impresora predeterminada del negocio ticked). Typically a printer near the till.
• Kitchen tickets — routed per line based on each line's product category. The category's Destino de impresión picks the printer. If a category has no destination, brasio walks up the parent chain to find one, and falls back to the default printer if none is set.

So a table that has two pizzas, a wine and a beer might produce two tickets: one to the kitchen printer (pizzas), and the wine and beer go on the receipt only — drinks don't print to kitchen by default.

Set destinations on categories

1. On the till, open Catálogo.
2. Pick a category from the sidebar (e.g. Pizzas).
3. In the Destino de impresión dropdown, pick the target printer (e.g. Cocina).
4. Save.

Subcategories inherit the parent's destination unless you override them. A subcategory with the dropdown left on (Por defecto del sistema) uses its parent's destination, then the venue default.

Drinks categories (beer, wine, spirits) are usually left on (Por defecto del sistema) — drinks generally don't need a kitchen ticket. They print only on the receipt at payment time.

Test the routing

The fastest way to confirm routing is working:

1. Open a test table.
2. Add one product from each category you've routed (e.g. a pizza, a flatbread, a beer).
3. Tap A cocina on the active tab.
4. Watch the physical printers — each one prints the lines that resolved to its destination.

If a ticket comes out at the wrong printer, the category destination is wrong. If nothing comes out at all, the bridge daemon is offline or the printer is unreachable — see Printer not printing.

What appears on the ticket

Each kitchen ticket carries the table number, the course, server initials, and one line per item with quantity, modifiers and notes. Notes are printed highlighted so the chef can spot them. Logo (if uploaded) prints at the top left.

The same ticket layout is used by both the PDF path and the ESC/POS bridge — the bridge just bypasses the OS print dialog and pushes ESC/POS bytes straight to the printer's port 9100.

Stale-destination warning

If you delete a printer that some categories were routed to, the category editor flags those rows with Impresora no encontrada (¿eliminada?); se usará la predeterminada. The system silently falls back to the default printer until you assign a valid destination. Fix the routing at your next opportunity to keep the audit log clean.

Not working?

• Everything still goes to the default: confirm the category's Destino de impresión is set to a specific printer, not (Por defecto del sistema). Sub-categories inherit upward.
• printer.no_default error: no printer is marked as default. Edit a printer and tick Impresora predeterminada del negocio.
• Bridge tray icon is red: see Connect your thermal printer Part B troubleshooting.
• A printer's Probar button errors: test the network reach with telnet <printer-ip> 9100 from the bridge machine. If that fails, the printer isn't reachable, not a brasio problem.

A note for Triple Brew

Triple Brew currently runs on the legacy PDF-iframe printing path (browser-driven, single OS-default printer). The ESC/POS bridge + per-category routing described here is an opt-in upgrade — switch when you're ready to bring a second printer online.