Question about VNC+Tablet

[xstefen]

Sup doods and sexy ladies,

So I am working on a project for one of my clients for work.

They are a construction company and currently when out on job sites they use laptops with usb printers. Alot. Naturally being stuck wired is not good, and also the laptops have a hard time and alot of them get broken being around that environment.

A possible solution that I think would work for them, they want to move to tablets. Basically my idea is to have some tablets with 3g/4g functionality as they WILL NOT be on a network. Have a VNC client to connect to a termserver. And a bluetooth printer. I want to use the tablet to connect to the termserver and print to the bluetooth printer [from the termserv thru the tablet].

I've done some looking around and research and I see a few potential VNC apps, but as far as Bluetooth printing/passthru driver I have not seen much about.

I would use ePrint as a possibility but 99% of the time these devices will not be networked.

A wifi hotspot was another idea, but this is a construction crew, and thats just one more device for them to setup and configure each time they go to another job site. Thats why I was thinking 3g/4g+bluetooth would be a better solution.

Any ideas, different suggestions, knowledge of the setup I'm looking for, ANY feedback is appreciated. Thanks alot

 

[divinebovine]

As with laptops you'll need ruggedized tablets. I don't know if they make such a thing but I would assume so.

VNC as a protocol is not secure, except certain proprietary implementations that include encryption. You'll need to tunnel it. I tunnel VNC over ssh but I don't know if it can be done on a tablet.

For printing you're probably barking up the wrong tree with bluetooth-IP bridging. It might make more sense to print to PDF and upload that PDF to a webprint service (which may be the "ePrint" you mentioned) over 3g.

 

[xstefen]

That's what I told the bosses when they wanted me to see what I could find. The term connections I've been running for a while, but I've never tried printing from a tablet at all, much less thru a remote app and with blue tooth. I'm thinking a hot spot app, auto enabled and static configs for both it and the printer, I have to figure out the vnc pass thru tho. Hopefully someone has tried this and I don't have to gather a bunch of hardware and just test

Lmao they also mentioned printing non 8 by etc paper size on top of that lol

I'd rather they suck it up, setup the laptop/printer In some sort of trailer and quit breaking stuff. Interesting project at least