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Using the Brother QL-500/QL-550 label printers from Linux
I was looking for a good label printer for a project of mine and couldn't get my hands on an already Linux-supported Dymo-Costar LabelWriter series.
Instead I found the Brother P-Touch LQ-550 that had the sturdiness, flexibility and low cost-per-label I wanted, but no Linux driver.
As I was in a hurry and without any other valid options, I decided to buy the printer and try to hack something under Linux to make it print whatever I wanted; the problem was that there was no information available at all on how it worked and I couldn't find anyone who had tried to hack it yet as it was a new product.
Brother's web site for programming resources includes a closed-source SDK for Windows platforms only and provides no information on the protocol used for communicating with their P-Touch printers. Useless waste of time.
Like most printers of this type, the protocol used to print is fortunately rather simple: each line to print is made of single bit representing the dots to be burned on the thermal paper and the data stream is sent uncompressed to the printer through a USB channel.
I first proceeded to install the Windows driver and play with the provided labelling utility P-Touch Editor to check out the possibilities of the printer. Then I installed SnoopyPro, an Open Source USB sniffer to collect the data streams sent to the printer and proceeded to make a lot of printouts, varying only one option at a time to check its effect on the commands sent to the printer.
In a couple of hours, I managed to get most of the basics and cobbled together a short protocol description to describe my findings.
After about a couple of years, there are now quite a bit of useful information and drivers for that printer as you will find below, including recently released drivers for Linux, both from the community and from Brother themselves.
Resources
- NEW: Official PT-9500PC Raster Mode Command Reference PDF from Brother. (thanks to Cristian Georgescu for the submission).
- NEW: Official PT-9500PC ESC/P Command Reference PDF from Brother. (thanks to Cristian Georgescu for the submission).
- NEW: Official CUPS and LPR drivers from Brother.
- QL550LabelPrinterProtocol : my own protocol description Data Sheet for the QL-500/QL-550
- QL550LabelPrinterRaw : how to share the printer between Windows clients on a network using linux as a printer server.
- QL550LabelPrinterPerl : a Perl interface to print and manage the printer directly.
- QL550LabelPrinterCUPS : Linux printer driver for printing from any application.
- Dymo LabelWriter Technical info: a useful PDF of the technical specification for the Dymo LabelWriter which uses a similar technology to the QL-500/QL-550 (thanks to Dave from Dymo Australia for this).
Links
- The official page for the Brother P-Touch QL-550
- Brother P-Touch solutions and programmer SDK for Windows
- The official page for the pbm2lwxl driver for the Dymo-Costar and some Avery label printers
- The LinuxPrinting.org page for those printers
- Brother PTouch 2500pc driver for perl that I used for my own Perl driver
- SnoopyPro USB Sniffer on SourceForge.
- John Glenstrup's p-touch cups driver page.
A cups driver would be great. However, it also suprises me that brother does not deliver a driver, because of their pro-active atttitude towards linux (http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html)
Yes Brother supports Linux, but only for their standard printer products unfortunately.ČI hope they will consider their labelling printers as well but I doubt that they will do much: the P-Touch software used to make and print labels is windows only and proting it to linux would be a pretty major endeavour I guess, so it's unlikely that they would spend time on this unless we keep badgering them for it.ČI urge everyone to just make requests though their enquiry form: https://secure5.brother.co.jp/LinuxContactUs/contact/Linuxform.htmlČ
I've had extremely bad luck... things weren't working under linux (I got the perl script to work, but nothing via cups) and hooked the thing up to a mac i have here. Turns out that you cant just 'lpr' direct to the label printer under osx, either, you have to use this utterly braindead P-touch editor app. Very frustrating.
I know this is some what of an old article, but I would like to point out that I have found Offical Brother Test Drivers. I don\'t know for sure if they have anymore as this is the only page I was able to find. With a little copying and paste of the ppd file in the right location for ubuntu I was able to get it to work. (ppd file should go in /usr/share/ppd, copy it form /usr/share/cups/model/brql5*0.ppd). Here is the link. solutions.brother.com/bsc_ph/os/linux/linux_ql500550.html