And Several Years Later ... The 'Label Print Portal' ... Huzzah

Hello there and welcome to another long and overdue post by your one and only SWAKES.

So what's in store for todays post? Well going back several years ago, I started on a project (like many others) to build a 'Label Print Portal' with the aim of being able to print various types of labels (address, food, label) from a web portal within my home network.

Having previous experience with Dymo label printers, I started off with a trusty Dymo LabelWriter 450 and a spare Raspberry Pi 3B. Building the web portal/UI was fine and dandy but it all came to the halt when trying to figure out the API/integration side of things. So along with the other projects, it ended up collecting dust in a cupboard and eventually sold not long ago.

Whilst scrolling through the 'Electronics' section on Facebook Marketplace I came across a listing for a Brother label printer (QL-570) which then got me reminiscing.

After a quick Google search for "raspberry pi label printer" I stumbled across 'brother-ql'. It is a prebuilt package/application to easily print from a Raspberry Pi (or Linux environment) to a label printer (using Brother printers). And even fucking better is that there is an additional module/addon/feature called 'brother_ql_web' for a web UI/interface to print from as well.

Fucking A. It looks like patience has paid off as someone has done the hard work already! Hats off to 'pklaus' as this has made it alot easier!

This time around I've swapped out the Raspberry Pi 3 for a Zero which I've been able to mount underneath the printer. Initially I wanted to mount the Raspberry Pi Zero inside of the printer however after taking it apart, there simply wasn't enough room.

With everything connected, setup and tested the last task was to customise the UI as the original/default portal was rather bland. This part probably took the longest as I had to try and 'reverse engineer' the code for the 'brother_ql_web' application and figure out where the web UI CSS/HTML actually lived! After many hours of tinkering I managed to edit the relevant elements and conjured up the UI you see below ...

The printer is currently stored in a cupboard downstairs. It's not used daily, but comes in handy for various tasks like printing mailing labels or labeling food items.