5 ms·

Pwning a Brother labelmaker, for fun and interop

188 points by LorenDB 2y ago

noman-land 2y ago
Super fun read.
- all2 2y ago
  Can confirm.
gnat 2y ago
https://archive.is/2024.07.03-033502/http://sdomi.pl/weblog/20-pwning-a-labelmaker/ https://archive.is/2024.07.03-033502/http://sdomi.pl/weblog/...
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I was about to buy a D610BT or P710BT (to use on Mac) ... what enshittification should I know about?
  - voltagex_ 2y ago
    I think the protocols for those are reasonably well understood, but e.g. you can only print via USB from a Mac, Bluetooth was only on a phone AFAICR
    - crazysim 2y ago
      Been printing on my D610BT from my Mac via BT since I got it. Very handy as I don't need to fumble for a cable anymore.
- dfox 2y ago
  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 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”.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    Zebra printers only print on the surface and have the usual limitations of thermal printers. P-touch TZ uses thermal transfer which enables a variety of foreground and background colors, different cover laminates, ribbons, and heatshrink tubing. The laminated tapes are printed on the back of the lamination ensuring the image can't be removed and is immune to subsequent heat or fading with age.
  - kotaKat 2y ago
    Gonna chime in with a funny tip. The Zebra LP2844 is a workhorse 4x6 label printer. Zebra took the design and sells it as the "all new" ZP888 in China and other foreign markets at stupidly low costs. There are Alibaba sellers that will help you snag one back into the US for around $150-200 instead of the massive cost of Zebra's US products ;)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Lammy 2y ago
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 r̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ 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?
- josephcsible 2y ago
  How is saying "stop manufacturing new stuff that's obsolete from day 1" advocating for e-waste?
  - parl_match 2y ago
    If it's an appliance, I would hardly think it's obsolete hardware if it's performing the required task. There are other issues, of course.
  - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    "Obsolete" is a word with a cultural stigma attached, which is the belief that things which are older are worse. A label printer ought to be judged on its ability to print labels first and foremost. If it is designed such that it eventually must be discarded because it is no longer good at printing labels, that should reflect poorly on it. My label printer sits next to my stapler. The stapler is a Swingline from the 70s, I think my parents gave it to me when I was in college? Regardless, it cannot really be considered obsolete, because it staples just as well as it did when it was made. The latest advances in technology do not make new staplers function any better. Similarly, my label printer has a qwerty keyboard and does not need to keep pace with modern wifi standards, as long as 12mm ink/label cartridges are available (and they have been the same since the 90s) and the NiMH battery can be recharged, it will work just as well as when it was new. The smoothness of the gradient on the CUPS internal web server is so irrelevant to the merits of the label printer that it does not deserve to be mentioned. Some printers and chart plotters are very large, very expensive machines that can nonetheless function for decades, and fortunately, the CUPS project still supports them. It's unfortunate that one of the most desirable attributes of a printer is that it supports wireless networking, and that wireless networking security standards have as much churn as they do, which causes label printers like this one to become e-waste.
m463 2y ago
do the the brother label printers have a backing to peel off? I had a dymo d1 style label printer years ago and liked it, but it was a pain to get the backing to come off the labels when you wanted to stick them. (dymo labelmanager pnp) Then I got a brother QL-1100 and it was a big step up. Labels easily come off the backing and if you want, 3rd party labels are cheap and available. I rarely pull out the dymo anymore. You can even print like from a database and it will spit out a pile of cut labels with no intervention. also linux software on github (haven't tried it)
- RowanH 2y ago
  The PT-P models (we've got and a lot of our clients use the PT-P900W) - it does a very nifty "half cut" on laminated tape labels that makes it super easy to peel and stick. Love the API it has, aside from some quirks - we can control the printer from within our Android/iOS apps - literally can tell it to half cut the labels or not.
moogly 2y ago
I'd like to hack my P-Touch to not waste 1" of tape every goddamn print for no discernible reason. I've read Brother's reason and I don't see it.
- liminalsunset 2y ago
  Well fortunately, there is a setting that you can use to do "chain printing" where if you have a number of labels to print, it simply won't cut the last one it prints, and then you can send another job to the printer and it'll cut that one out and print the next (leaving the last thing it printed uncut, if you still have the box checked). I don't particularly doubt the waste of tape is somewhat necessary. The way TZe tape works is there's a double side sticky backing, a thin film with a coating of ink (selectively transfers, with the used tape re-rolled internally) when heated and pressed onto the sticky backing), and a clear coverlay. The problem is that because of the thickness of the cutter assembly (which is actually just a mechanized pair of scissors internally), there is about an inch of tape after the layers have been laminated, but before the tape is cut. The printer has to advance the tape to get it cut at the right place, but by the time it's gotten there, the tape now has a stub of white tape on it, which if not cut off, would get stuck to the next label. "Chain printing" solves this problem by letting the printer delay the "advance and cut" operation until it has something to fill the otherwise wasted inch with.
  - 037 2y ago
    I studied the mechanism, and while it’s true that some tape must be wasted, I think there is room for improvement (with a different idea or even small changes, given that I have a Dymo that uses the same mechanism but wastes much less tape). I simply believe there aren’t enough incentives to research something that saves tape.
  - 0xDEADFED5 2y ago
    Yep, as someone who has printed thousands of these damn labels in the past, this is the answer.
  - moogly 2y ago
    The chain printing is not so user friendly, I find; I just ended up typing out multiple labels with spaces inbetween instead, and cutting them with a pair of scissors. This (along with the chain printing) only works when you know you have a lot of (similar) labels to print beforehand. To me, it's also less about the cost of the wasted tape, and more about the extra litter it produces.
metadat 2y ago
I love the old-school font on this page. Reminds me of Word Perfect on the old Macintosh computers. > pxplus_ibm_vga8regular https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22pxplus_ibm_vga8regular%22+font https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22pxplus_ibm_vga8regular%22+f... Why is it only available from seedy foreign font sites?
- jasonjayr 2y ago
  Get it and more from the source: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ That happens to be my favorite programming font. I cut my teeth on qbasic/DOS, so in 2024 I still use that font in my linux terminals + VSCode :)
  - metadat 2y ago
    Wow, thank you so much for the reference! I must transition from a substack to a proper statically generated site so I can use this font, haha. Cheers!
Nectar0516 2y ago
> # sorry for this being so long, i have no way to format it sanely x.x Here ya go, I fixed it (or just see the pastebin link if you're curious what it says): wget -O conffile https://pastebin.com/raw/eGfKdvh8 curl ... \ --data-urlencode 'org.cups.sid=1862ff74a0c01dd0fb444934e7e67e05' \ --data-urlencode 'OP=config-server' \ --data-urlencode "CUPSDCONF@conffile" \ --data-urlencode 'SAVECHANGES=Save+Changes' >/dev/null
instagib 2y ago
I realized after finishing a reel in a label maker that some have a negative film type reel to them that discharges when printing. Before throwing it away, I looked at it and it contained classified information.
- dctoedt 2y ago
  > it contained classified information. Is that like the way that, in the days of typewriters, government people typing highly-sensitive information would sometimes burn the typewriter ribbon?
gotorazor 2y ago
I don't do these things. I didn't realized that printers have CUPS server installed on them now. I find it kind of wild. Like, why?
markstos 2y ago
I reduce the attack surface area of my label maker by unplugging it when not in use, which is most of the time. Also lowers the electric bill.
russianasset 2y ago
[flagged]
roywashere 2y ago
I have a three year old Brother laser printer and for the longest time, I had problems using the wireless printing feature. My laptop would recognize the printer, install it but fail to print. Only using the USB cable it would work. Three months ago, I found the printer web UI using nmap and found there was an ‘update’ with a date of 2020 on it (so before I bought the printer) and I installed it and wireless printing now works flawlessly :-)

188 points by LorenDB 2y ago

noman-land 2y ago

Super fun read.

all2 2y ago
Can confirm.

gnat 2y ago

https://archive.is/2024.07.03-033502/http://sdomi.pl/weblog/20-pwning-a-labelmaker/ https://archive.is/2024.07.03-033502/http://sdomi.pl/weblog/...

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

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 2y ago
I was about to buy a D610BT or P710BT (to use on Mac) ... what enshittification should I know about?
- voltagex_ 2y ago
  I think the protocols for those are reasonably well understood, but e.g. you can only print via USB from a Mac, Bluetooth was only on a phone AFAICR
  - crazysim 2y ago
    Been printing on my D610BT from my Mac via BT since I got it. Very handy as I don't need to fumble for a cable anymore.
dfox 2y ago
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 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”.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Zebra printers only print on the surface and have the usual limitations of thermal printers. P-touch TZ uses thermal transfer which enables a variety of foreground and background colors, different cover laminates, ribbons, and heatshrink tubing. The laminated tapes are printed on the back of the lamination ensuring the image can't be removed and is immune to subsequent heat or fading with age.
- kotaKat 2y ago
  Gonna chime in with a funny tip. The Zebra LP2844 is a workhorse 4x6 label printer. Zebra took the design and sells it as the "all new" ZP888 in China and other foreign markets at stupidly low costs. There are Alibaba sellers that will help you snag one back into the US for around $150-200 instead of the massive cost of Zebra's US products ;)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Lammy 2y ago

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 r̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ 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?

josephcsible 2y ago
How is saying "stop manufacturing new stuff that's obsolete from day 1" advocating for e-waste?
- parl_match 2y ago
  If it's an appliance, I would hardly think it's obsolete hardware if it's performing the required task. There are other issues, of course.
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  "Obsolete" is a word with a cultural stigma attached, which is the belief that things which are older are worse. A label printer ought to be judged on its ability to print labels first and foremost. If it is designed such that it eventually must be discarded because it is no longer good at printing labels, that should reflect poorly on it. My label printer sits next to my stapler. The stapler is a Swingline from the 70s, I think my parents gave it to me when I was in college? Regardless, it cannot really be considered obsolete, because it staples just as well as it did when it was made. The latest advances in technology do not make new staplers function any better. Similarly, my label printer has a qwerty keyboard and does not need to keep pace with modern wifi standards, as long as 12mm ink/label cartridges are available (and they have been the same since the 90s) and the NiMH battery can be recharged, it will work just as well as when it was new. The smoothness of the gradient on the CUPS internal web server is so irrelevant to the merits of the label printer that it does not deserve to be mentioned. Some printers and chart plotters are very large, very expensive machines that can nonetheless function for decades, and fortunately, the CUPS project still supports them. It's unfortunate that one of the most desirable attributes of a printer is that it supports wireless networking, and that wireless networking security standards have as much churn as they do, which causes label printers like this one to become e-waste.

m463 2y ago

do the the brother label printers have a backing to peel off? I had a dymo d1 style label printer years ago and liked it, but it was a pain to get the backing to come off the labels when you wanted to stick them. (dymo labelmanager pnp) Then I got a brother QL-1100 and it was a big step up. Labels easily come off the backing and if you want, 3rd party labels are cheap and available. I rarely pull out the dymo anymore. You can even print like from a database and it will spit out a pile of cut labels with no intervention. also linux software on github (haven't tried it)

RowanH 2y ago
The PT-P models (we've got and a lot of our clients use the PT-P900W) - it does a very nifty "half cut" on laminated tape labels that makes it super easy to peel and stick. Love the API it has, aside from some quirks - we can control the printer from within our Android/iOS apps - literally can tell it to half cut the labels or not.

moogly 2y ago

I'd like to hack my P-Touch to not waste 1" of tape every goddamn print for no discernible reason. I've read Brother's reason and I don't see it.

liminalsunset 2y ago
Well fortunately, there is a setting that you can use to do "chain printing" where if you have a number of labels to print, it simply won't cut the last one it prints, and then you can send another job to the printer and it'll cut that one out and print the next (leaving the last thing it printed uncut, if you still have the box checked). I don't particularly doubt the waste of tape is somewhat necessary. The way TZe tape works is there's a double side sticky backing, a thin film with a coating of ink (selectively transfers, with the used tape re-rolled internally) when heated and pressed onto the sticky backing), and a clear coverlay. The problem is that because of the thickness of the cutter assembly (which is actually just a mechanized pair of scissors internally), there is about an inch of tape after the layers have been laminated, but before the tape is cut. The printer has to advance the tape to get it cut at the right place, but by the time it's gotten there, the tape now has a stub of white tape on it, which if not cut off, would get stuck to the next label. "Chain printing" solves this problem by letting the printer delay the "advance and cut" operation until it has something to fill the otherwise wasted inch with.
- 037 2y ago
  I studied the mechanism, and while it’s true that some tape must be wasted, I think there is room for improvement (with a different idea or even small changes, given that I have a Dymo that uses the same mechanism but wastes much less tape). I simply believe there aren’t enough incentives to research something that saves tape.
- 0xDEADFED5 2y ago
  Yep, as someone who has printed thousands of these damn labels in the past, this is the answer.
- moogly 2y ago
  The chain printing is not so user friendly, I find; I just ended up typing out multiple labels with spaces inbetween instead, and cutting them with a pair of scissors. This (along with the chain printing) only works when you know you have a lot of (similar) labels to print beforehand. To me, it's also less about the cost of the wasted tape, and more about the extra litter it produces.

metadat 2y ago

I love the old-school font on this page. Reminds me of Word Perfect on the old Macintosh computers. > pxplus_ibm_vga8regular https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22pxplus_ibm_vga8regular%22+font https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22pxplus_ibm_vga8regular%22+f... Why is it only available from seedy foreign font sites?

jasonjayr 2y ago
Get it and more from the source: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ That happens to be my favorite programming font. I cut my teeth on qbasic/DOS, so in 2024 I still use that font in my linux terminals + VSCode :)
- metadat 2y ago
  Wow, thank you so much for the reference! I must transition from a substack to a proper statically generated site so I can use this font, haha. Cheers!

Nectar0516 2y ago

> # sorry for this being so long, i have no way to format it sanely x.x Here ya go, I fixed it (or just see the pastebin link if you're curious what it says): wget -O conffile https://pastebin.com/raw/eGfKdvh8 curl ... \ --data-urlencode 'org.cups.sid=1862ff74a0c01dd0fb444934e7e67e05' \ --data-urlencode 'OP=config-server' \ --data-urlencode "CUPSDCONF@conffile" \ --data-urlencode 'SAVECHANGES=Save+Changes' >/dev/null

instagib 2y ago

I realized after finishing a reel in a label maker that some have a negative film type reel to them that discharges when printing. Before throwing it away, I looked at it and it contained classified information.

dctoedt 2y ago
> it contained classified information. Is that like the way that, in the days of typewriters, government people typing highly-sensitive information would sometimes burn the typewriter ribbon?

gotorazor 2y ago

I don't do these things. I didn't realized that printers have CUPS server installed on them now. I find it kind of wild. Like, why?

markstos 2y ago

I reduce the attack surface area of my label maker by unplugging it when not in use, which is most of the time. Also lowers the electric bill.

russianasset 2y ago

[flagged]

roywashere 2y ago

I have a three year old Brother laser printer and for the longest time, I had problems using the wireless printing feature. My laptop would recognize the printer, install it but fail to print. Only using the USB cable it would work. Three months ago, I found the printer web UI using nmap and found there was an ‘update’ with a date of 2020 on it (so before I bought the printer) and I installed it and wireless printing now works flawlessly :-)