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Setting up a Star SP500 Wireless Printer

By In Technology

The wonderfully undocumented SP500 printer with wireless Ethernet connection has been the bane of my existence for the last few days.

So I have the IFBD-HW03/04 model, which isn’t even mentioned really in the manual. That means that my firmware is a thousand years old.

This is silly for many reason, but it also forces me to use a Windows machine as well… which just makes me grind my teeth. YOU HAVE TO HAVE A WINDOWS PC WITH IE to do this.

First things first, find the MAC address.

  1. Turn of the printer
  2. Hold the FEED button
  3. Turn it back ON
  4. After you hear the first BEEP, let go the FEED button
  5. Wait a minute or two. Yeah, seriously.
  6. It’ll print out one page of useless information. And then with a big pause in between, it’ll print out the network information, which is what you need.

Then load up the Star Micronics Printer Utility which you can actually download from their website.

  1. Choose SP512 as your printer
  2. Ethernet as your connection.
  3. You should be able to hit “Search Network” and find the printer, but that has never worked for me. So….
  4. Hit Temporary IP Address Assignment
  5. Fill in the MAC Address from your receipt
  6. On your Windows machine, Start > Run > cmd
  7. Find your IP address of your machine with “ipconfig”
  8. Whatever your IP is, give the printer something similar, so you are XXX.XXX.XXX.153 make the printer .158 or something
  9. Hit OK and you should be prompted to go to the control panel.

Next, the interface

  1. The tool will open the interface in your default browser. If this is not IE (which hopefully it isn’t’), open up IE and type in the printer’s IP.
  2. The username is just “root”
  3. Go to NIC
  4. Then got to WiFi-.11b (no it does not support WAP)
  5. Choose “Infra.” as your Wireless Mode (I guess there wasn’t room for “Infrastructure”)
  6. Pop in your SSID of the network you want it to join and the WEP key.

NOW – theoretically this should just work. But I haven’t had any luck.

 

How to reset the printer’s Ethernet settings.

If you screw something up, you’re dead in the water. The problem is you have to connect to the printer in Ad-Hoc mode (SSID STAR-WIFI) before you can set it up. So if you mess something up on the network settings, you can’t get back in to fix it. Fortunately, you can reset this (although you’d never know from reading the manual) but hitting the second dip switch on the WiFi card.

Open up the case

Find the second switch on the WiFi card. Make sure the printer is OFF. Push it to the DOWN position. Then turn the printer back ON and let it boot up. After that, turn it OFF again. Put the switch back to the UP position and turn it back ON. All the settings are now cleared 🙂

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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Is Anyone Working on Agentic Authentication?

In Technology

Everyone is building AI-powered tools, even people who shouldn’t be. Agents seem to be the next obvious (and big?) step. But these little bots need a secure way to act on behalf of users without causing chaos.

Richard Dulude at Underscore VC wrote about the lack of identity standards for AI agents in this LinkedIn article. I don’t know Richard or Underscore VC (sorry). But, he’s right, traditional authentication assumes either a human or a machine with static credentials, and that doesn’t work for AI agents that need to make decisions and take actions. Companies want accountability (and probably liability), and users need control of what their potentially psychedelic robot is doing on their behalf. This balance doesn’t exist yet.

This is probably for another blog post, but right now, everyone, including the bots, are using human interfaces as a stopgap. OpenAI’s Operator is a great example, agents pretending to be humans to interact with systems that weren’t built for them. That’s fine for now, but eventually, the human interfaces will be an afterthought. Like how “mobile-first” design took over, we’ll be doing “agent-first” design with human-accessible backups. Having a dedicated standard for agentic authentication might be a good first step in that machine-to-machine way of thinking and designing systems.

Agentic Proxy Credentials (APC): A Solution (A Term I Totally Made Up)

I made this up. It’s probably a bad term, but naming things is fun. This doesn’t exist… if you are a large battery and power supply company, don’t sue me. I’m spitballing here.

One possible fix is the “sucked out of my thumb” Agentic Proxy Credentials (APC). This would let users grant their AI agents secure, limited permissions to interact with systems while making sure the right level of oversight are in place. There are things that I wanted to do this very week, but I don’t trust my bots with my actual usernames and passwords:

Stop me talking to Airline Idiot Bots

Talking to airline chatbots is painful. Right now, they can only regurgitate FAQ answers. With an APC, my AI assistant could log into my airline account, check flights based on my loyalty status, and rebook me without you having to touch anything. This would make AI actually useful instead of just a slightly smarter help page.

Paying for small things without having to deal with entering my ACH data AGAIN

I don’t want to give an AI full access to my bank account. But I wouldn’t mind letting it handle small transactions in a controlled way. With APCs, I could grant my assistant time-limited access to approve payments or move money within strict limits. The AI does the work, I stay in control, and my bank account doesn’t mysteriously empty overnight… unless I’m Ambien shopping again.

AI Dungeon Master’s Assistant

D&D is great, but session prep is a time sink. I want an AI that logs into my D&D Beyond account, manages stat blocks, generates lore-friendly content, and even takes session notes. The AI handles the boring admin work, and you get to focus on making your players cry (or cheer, if you’re nice). Yes, serious stuff here.

How It Could Work

There are a few ways to make this happen, I think. I’m no longer allowed to do actual engineering at my own companies I founded, so this blog is my outlet. Everyone needs a hobby.

Is Someone Already Building This?

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Okta, OAuth, or OpenAI are already working on this and I’m just ranting for no reason. But if they aren’t, they should be. The pieces are all there, someone just has to put them together.

I need this, but I can’t find it. If anyone is working on it, let me know. I’m too busy trying to solve employee gifting at scale at Thankscrate, implementing AI into every existing business at Sourcetoad, and making sure passengers can watch TV and book dinner reservations in the middle of nowhere at OnDeck.