vsigler

Controlling the Brother P-Touch Cube label maker from a computer

The Brother PTP300BT label maker is intended to be controlled using the official Brother P-Touch Design & Print iOS/Android app. The app has arbitrary limits on what you can print (1 text object and up to 3 preset icons), so I thought it would be a fun challenge to reverse engineer the protocol to print whatever I wanted.

Python code at the bottom if you want to skip the fine details.

Process

Intitially I had a quick peek at the Android APK to see if there was any useful information inside. The code that handles the communication with the printer in Print&Design turned out to be a native library, but the app clearly prepares a bitmap image and passes it to this native library for printing. Bitmaps are definitely something we can work with.

tenderlove

###
# Execute tests in parallel using multiple processes.  Uses DRb to communicate
# between processes over a unix socket.

gem 'minitest', '~> 5.1.0'
require 'minitest'
require 'minitest/spec'
require 'minitest/mock'
require 'drb'
require 'drb/unix'

jhbabon

build_package_patch_ruby_railsexpress() {
  fetch_git rvm-patchsets git://github.com/skaes/rvm-patchsets.git master
 
  for p in rvm-patchsets/patches/ruby/1.9.3/p484/railsexpress/* ; do
    patch -p1 < $p
  done
}
 
install_package "yaml-0.1.4" "http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz#36c852831d02cf90508c29852361d01b"
install_package "ruby-1.9.3-p484" "http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p484.tar.gz#8ac0dee72fe12d75c8b2d0ef5d0c2968" patch_ruby_railsexpress autoconf standard

elandesign

#!/bin/bash

# XCode Tools
xcode-select --install

# Homebrew
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

# *nix tools
brew install git imagemagick memcached mongodb mysql nmap openssl qt rabbitmq rbenv ruby-build zookeeper bash-completion