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What Raven is

A cloud bridge to the devices inside your customers’ venues: outbound-only, no inbound ports, no VPN.

Your customers' venues are full of devices you cannot reach: receipt printers on a back-office switch, scales on a serial cable, payment terminals behind a router nobody has the password to. Reaching them from your software normally means a VPN, a port forward, or a static IP per site, and an IT conversation at every single venue.

Raven removes that conversation. A small connector sits on the venue's own network and opens one outbound connection to the cloud. Nothing listens for inbound traffic, no port is opened, and no VPN is provisioned. You call an HTTPS API; the work comes out on the device.

From wherever the order is taken

Send it once.
See it land.

  1. 01The till firesone ticket, every printer it needs
  2. 02The cloud sends one toodelivery apps, your own software
  3. 03Down one line into the venueand onto the right device
  4. 04The answer comes backconfirmations and weights
In the cloud · whoever sends the workDelivery appsCloud POSAnything else you runthe orders that arrive on their ownyour suite · the till, the kiosk, the appone REST API, that's the contractTillKioskAppsRaven cloudorders, downconfirmations & weights, upIn the venue · one local networkRaven boxLegacy tillKitchen printerBar printerCounter scaleon the floor · never learned the cloudfires the foodfires the drinksweighs, live

Legacy till Delivery apps Cloud POS · kiosk · apps Confirmations & weights

One line into the venue, shared by everything that sends work: your POS, a delivery platform, your back office. Confirmations come back up the same line.

What you can do with it

  • Print. Submit a ticket as XML and Raven renders it for the printer at the other end: receipts, kitchen orders, labels. See Printing a ticket.
  • Weigh. Ask a scale for a reading and get it back in the same HTTP response.
  • Bridge anything else. Any device with an HTTP interface can be proxied transparently: your request goes in one end and the device's response comes out the other.

If you can't change the POS

Plenty of integrations involve software that will never gain an API call. For those, the connector can present itself as a printer on the venue LAN: you re-point the till at the connector's address and it takes the job from there. No code change on the POS at all, and it composes with sharing, so a venue can move one till at a time. What it costs you in traceability, and how to turn it on, is on Printer settings.

Who does what

Raven's customer is you, the integrator. You buy connectors ready to install, your technician sets one up while they are already on site installing the POS, and your software talks to the API. The venue's own staff never configure anything. As far as they are concerned, tickets simply print.

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