[HN Gopher] Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
___________________________________________________________________
Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop
Author : LorenDB
Score : 42 points
Date : 2024-07-02 18:21 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sdomi.pl)
(TXT) w3m dump (sdomi.pl)
| noman-land wrote:
| Super fun read.
| all2 wrote:
| Can confirm.
| gnat wrote:
| https://archive.is/2024.07.03-033502/http://sdomi.pl/weblog/...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You're much better off getting an older TZ/TZe P-touch with a USB
| port from before the more recent enshittification. CUPS supports
| them well and there are utilities that can print images direct to
| them.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I was about to buy a D610BT or P710BT (to use on Mac) ... what
| enshittification should I know about?
| dfox wrote:
| If you are serious about printing labels and can program you
| should get yourself a Zebra label printer or Intermec/Honeywell
| one that has ZPL emulation (these tend to be cheaper than
| Zebra, so near the pricing of Brother consumer stuff, but more
| fiddly with media alignment). ZPL is this super weird language,
| but after few hours you will be printing any labels you want
| without dealing with CUPS or its filter chains. Totally
| indispensable tool when you do that is
| https://labelary.com/viewer.html (the fonts there are somewhat
| off from what the real hardware does, but the sizing more or
| less matches)
|
| Edit: another thing that you get with Zebra/Honeywell is that
| these printers do not use proprietary media and transfer
| ribbons (if you go with TTR model, which I would recommend) and
| you can source the consumables anywhere you want as long as it
| will mechanically fit. We even use Zebra printer with Epson-
| branded continuous DT uncut label media to print a beer tap-
| list. Along that path we even found what can be hardware bug in
| the printer: apparently you cannot get the print head to
| overheat, as the power supply will go into thermal shutdown
| well before that, but in all fairness the thing was not
| designed to print half a meter long mostly black "labels".
| Lammy wrote:
| Fun read and great debugging but I'm honestly really sick of this
| kind of attitude since it's essentially arguing for more churn
| and for more e-waste:
|
| > There's a CUPS version that's 10+ years old, Linux kernel
| almost old enough to drink, all of that running crawling on an
| ARMv5.
|
| > but it seems that they have one specific design and they're
| happy to milk it for as long and as cheap as possible
|
| Like who fucking cares how old the CPU in a label printer is?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-05 23:00 UTC)