I am currently working on a project that requires me to use Brother P-touch printers with NixOS on Raspberry Pi. Manufacturer does not offer ARM64 drivers. Last driver update was from 2017 for the model I am using.
I spent the entire week figuring out why CUPS does not play well with open source drivers which are maintained by some unpaid heroes who are doing their best.
Eventually, I hacked together some code that implements printer’s raster language and uses usblp printer class driver.
It saddens me to see that there is little to no interest from manufacturers to provide and, most importantly, maintain working drivers.
I would have been certainly lost without open source alternatives and implementation examples.
I am currently working on a project that requires me to use Brother P-touch printers with NixOS on Raspberry Pi. Manufacturer does not offer ARM64 drivers. Last driver update was from 2017 for the model I am using.
I spent the entire week figuring out why CUPS does not play well with open source drivers which are maintained by some unpaid heroes who are doing their best.
Eventually, I hacked together some code that implements printer’s raster language and uses usblp printer class driver.
It saddens me to see that there is little to no interest from manufacturers to provide and, most importantly, maintain working drivers.
I would have been certainly lost without open source alternatives and implementation examples.