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Going down a rabbit hole with the Dymo LabelWriter

Background

This all began with an idea of turning my Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo printer into a story teller. Hack a day wrote a terrific article covering my efforts.

The story doesn’t end there! Once I wrote the code for the story writer, I continued to tinker with the little printer that could. Below are my exploits.

Projects

Turn a Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo into a story teller.

My first project with the printer to turn it into a story teller using receipt paper.

Command line printing to a raw USB printer

How do you communicate with your printer in the absence of printer drivers over the command line? This will tell you how!

Designs to 3d print your own replacement parts

Here you will find 3d printer files to print replacement parts for your LabelWriter.

Programs

Various command line programs to interface directly with your LabelWriter.

Printer Specs

• This printer has a resolution of 300dpi. Thats laser quality folks!
• The ‘print head’ has 672 heat dots in a line firing as needed and making the thermal paper turn black for each dot.
• There is only one moving part in the whole printer and that’s the paper advance. The print head does not move.
• No ink required. Woo hoo!
• The physical interface is dead simple, load the paper roll once, walk away. There is only one exterior button and that’s to move the paper to the perferated edge for tear off.
• After sending thousands of labels and now almost 3,000ft of receipt tape through, I have never had a jam.
• USB 2.0 interface. Vender ID: 0x0922h Product ID: 0x0019. Each device has a unique serial number which can be seen through the USB interface.