We are developing a small hardware device that consists of ESP32 development boards (~$50), 3D printed cases (~$3?), padded electronics cubes from Amazon (~$15), and a very light touch manual. Everything is rapidly evolving but since we want to track each device, we need to put a label on it with its MAC address and another identifier. And, if we’re going to go this far we might as well put a logo on there as well.
ptouch-print
Command line utility to send text and graphics to some of the Brother P-Touch label printers. I started with this MacOS fork: https://github.com/DavidPhillipOster/ptouch-print-macOS
This runs nicely on OSX but the various sites he references for the original source and documentation have vanished. This site offered the necessary instructions for using it effectively: https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/brother-ptouch-label-printer-on-linux
To combine a logo and text you need to make them both into PNG files and then print them both with a bit of padding between them. This also allows you to print multiple labels by stringing PNGs together.
From a workflow perspective this actually works quite well. Unfortunately the resolution of the label maker is rather poor.
It would be easy to write some Python to read the values from a CSV file and create all the labels I need in one pass.
Dymo LabelManager 420p
This is a handheld label maker with a alphabetical rather than QWERTY keyboard. Since I’ll rarely be typing on it, the keyboard isn’t an issue.
I’m driving this with Dymo’s “Dymo Connect” software. It has very simple layout capabilities for text, barcodes, QR codes, and images. For my purposes, I put a logo and three lines of text into the layout, hit print, and received a decent label.
I’ve not investigated to see if I could drive this from a spreadsheet to partial automate the process. For low production volumes I am OK with copy/pasting the information for each label.
Still rather pixelated but a bit crisper than the Brother. This is what you get with 180 dpi.
blabel
https://github.com/Edinburgh-Genome-Foundry/blabel
This was the first recommendation for something that might meet my requirements. Command line driven, written in Python, can ingest CSVs to produce multiple labels, basic layout capabilities via HTML and CSS style sheet.
It was a bit clunky to get working and I think we found a CSS layout problem but we eventually got it to reliably produce PDF files. But, what do I print these small PDFs to? I think I’d need yet another label printer, one that took PDFs.
Present and Future
Ultimately, we need a higher resolution printer that can print to pre-cut waterproof (thermal printed plastic). But for the moment, the Dymo is good enough.
Other Options
I tried or thought about a few other things:
- 3D printing the logo and identifiers directly on the case
- This would be hard for just in time assembly
- The available space is on the side of the case. We need to print the case lying on the top so the sides would be vertical. Printing fine text one layer at a time gets pretty ugly.
- Various forms of printing to sheets of labels
- I’m building 1-5 devices at a time. Populating the template and taking into account already used labels on the sheet was a bit annoying.
- Waterproof (plastic?) labels in sheet form were not easy to find