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Comment by jimmies | Hacker News Reader

FYI: If anyone looking for a label printer, get a Rollo and a Pi.

I sell stuff on Ebay from time to time, and one of my pet peeves is not having labels professionally printed and having to tape them. After researching stuff I decided to skip the Dymo stuff and went with Rollo. The Rollo only prints over USB, so I connected it to the Pi0w. It's so godsend nice, I can just shove it into the closet and print from any computer in the network. There is no software to install, it can print from literally any app.

Wifi QR codes? Print it and stick it on anything. Instructions to use an appliance or recipes? Print it. Freaking love it.

One more thing about the Rollo label printer is that they have some sort of deal with USPS so it's always cheaper to print the label from their "shipping manager" web interface. I haven't even shipped 30 packages from the time I got it two years ago and the printer already made the money I paid for it back.

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I do something similar with my (non-Rollo, generic model that a half dozen generic Chinese brands sell on Amazon) USB label printer. My ASUS router's firmware (<https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/>) supports a print server via its USB port. Although described as LPD/LPR, I found that it also supports JetDirect/AppSocket, supported within MacOS.

You still have to install a printer driver on the computer side (I found that a different label printer's driver works better than the one the vendor offers for download; go figure), but after telling MacOS to print to `socket://router`, everything works.

One issue I have found is that when set in greyscale mode, the conversion from color to greyscale doesn't work quite right. While visible in places such as the eBay logo on mailing labels printed from there, even black-and-white text and barcodes get smudged. I know that this is a driver issue, not a printer issue, because when I used CUPS from a Linux box as the print server the greyscale curve (as visible from the CUPS test print page) was different, and both black-and-white and color/greyscale elements were printed much more finely, but haven't figured out the issue yet. Meanwhile I print with the driver set to no greyscale.

> non-Rollo, generic model that a half dozen generic Chinese brands sell on Amazon

Do you have a link for it?

> I found that a different label printer's driver works better than the one the vendor offers for download; go figure

Which one?

>Do you have a link for it?

<https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B091FGYTXV/>

I use the MacOS driver for Oaustect OT-425A, but cannot find a download link for it. HPRT's own driver at <http://hprt.com/Downloads.html> works; the Oaustect driver just starts printing a few seconds faster. Also try the driver and instructions at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-la3VYrJEk>.

Thanks :)

You can get a brother QL series label printer for around $100 or less that will print the narrow format 7” postage labels. eBay supports this format with USPS and you also get a good discount through them. I don’t think FedEx or UPS support this format, but I rarely ship with them.

Brother has some free software to design label templates which you can then upload to QL printers. Then you can use their control language over TCP to print labels filling the fields you defined in the template with data; the printer can even generate a large number of barcodes this way. The barcodes even work at pretty small sizes, much smaller than if you were generating graphic barcodes and sending them as bitmaps to the printer. Probably because the rasterization of the barcodes is optimized by the printer for the printer.

The software is janky and their protocol is unidirectional (no way to tell if it printed a given label or ran out of paper, so you have to account for that in your software), but it's very easy to get it to work and when it works it really works. And it's pretty much unbeatable for cost.

I’ve got a and old WiFi Brother label printer with AirPrint built in and I love it.

If anybody is looking for home inventory software to work with their label printer, please check out this project I’ve been working on https://www.thingybase.com/

There’s documentation for how it works with label printers at https://www.thingybase.com/help/printers. If you try it and it doesn’t work quite right with your label printer open and issue at https://github.com/thingybase/community/issues

If you’re curious all the stuff you can do with a label printer in a home setting, I’ve got a list of projects I’ve done at https://www.thingybase.com/projects

I rather love my Brother QL810W. WiFi, with airprint, and you can buy like 20 rolls of sticky thermal labels for it for super cheap. I just bought a second one!

Where do you get super cheap label rolls?

Amazon has 100' rolls available in 10ct for $36 or so. I guess that's not "super cheap" but it seems cheap to me, for $40 I get way more labels than I can use in several years.

Why do you need a special printer? Can't you just put label stock in a regular printer?

If you're a small-volume user, a label printer might not have a good payback time - but it avoids throwing away an entire page of labels when you want a single label.

If you're labelling things in medium volume, like items in data centre racks, then changing the paper in the office printer is a hassle, and making sure no-one else prints on your labels by mistake is a hassle, and getting the text to align with the labels can be a hassle too. None of those is impossible, but hand-writing a label will be a lot easier. If you want to have professional-looking printed labels, a label printer is the right tool for the job.

If you're running a higher throughput operation like ebay order fulfilment, printing labels one at a time can simplify your processes - a worker who only has one order and one label can't get things crossed over. At the same time, serious label printers can offer thermal printing (no toner or ink to replace), huge reels of labels, automatic removal of backing material, and so on.

> If you're a small-volume user, a label printer might not have a good payback time - but it avoids throwing away an entire page of labels when you want a single label.

And if you are a nano-volume user like me (I label external HDDS/SSDs mostly), you can do well with a low-tech solution i.e. a fully mechanical label printer [0]. I use it twice a month and for that frequency it's absolutely perfect.

[0] like https://www.amazon.com/DYMO-Organizer-Xpress-Label-12966/dp/...

I have a cheap Dymo label printer that has a keyboard and that prints on sticker tape (I believe this one: https://www.dymo.com/label-makers-printers/letratag-label-ma...)

It cost around €20, three meters of off-brand sticker tape is less than €5, and it takes AA batteries which then last forever.

Very useful to have somewhere in a drawer.

I have that one too. It’s a joy to use it (^_^)

I don't have a 'regular' printer, just thermal label (Brother QL570 I think) and 3D (Prusa Mini) printers, heh. At some point I realised the only thing I printed was Amazon return labels, and a thermal label printer was more suited to the job (no ink to dry or run out and need replacing) so that's what I got.

You can get A4 (or US letter I assume) or whatever sheets of labels for a 'regular' printer yes, but that's honestly not as convenient as a roll, especially a continuous roll where it prints to whatever length and then chops off. Especially if your use is occasional, don't want to print a whole sheet at once - and even if you do, I don't know how good the tooling is for laying out an A4 sheet of pre-cut labels with a different address in each one?

You can, but if you need a one-of label or even just a handful, setting that up on a normal printer is a chore, (special paper, label offset, counting already used labels, etc). Label printers feed with rolls, which makes it easy to print and cut to size automatically (depending on if the roll is continuous or individual stickers).

I have a Brother QL which others have remarked in this thread as well. It has WiFi and everything, trivial to just create a label from your phone or computer.

Thermal label printers with a built-in cutter that print off a roll are way faster and easier, and only usually do one label at a time (you can't really print a letter/A4 sheet of sticky labels multiple times to use single labels off the sheet, the heat is bad for the labels). They're also only like a hundred bucks and a dozen rolls of thermal labels are $20 or so.

Thanks for posting!

I'd prefer a label printer which just prints strips of text, not those full-size labels.

Strips are more versatile. E.g. you can label cables with them. And if you want to print more than one line, just print a bunch of strips.

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