Ircama

Printing to a Brother P-Touch Cube PT-P300BT label printer from a computer

Introduction

The Brother P-touch Cube PT-P300BT labelling machine is intended to be controlled from the official Brother P-touch Design&Print 2 app for Android and iOS devices, instead of from a computer.

This Gist provides small code revision and some additional scripts to the dogtopus/Pipfile one, which in turn is forked from the excellent stecman one, in order to print text labels via scripts on computers with different O.S. or subsystems.

The scripts are used to convert text labels to appropriate images compatible with 12mm width craft tapes like [TZe-131

en4rab

Recovering the BIOS password from a Panasonic CF-U1 mk2 (AMI Aptio UEFI)

A mess of my own making

While messing with a CF-U1 handheld PC that I bought off ebay I managed to mess up the BIOS and it seems it reverted to previous settings which included an unknown BIOS password, it would however still boot into windows. Since I could still boot windows I was able to dump the bios flash using AFUWINGUI.EXE the version I used was 3.09.03.1462 which is available here:
https://ami.com/en/?Aptio_4_AMI_Firmware_Update_Utility.zip

stecman

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.