Brother Label Printer Integration#853

I have a Brother QL-820 label printer that I would like to be able to print out QR codes for the filament tracking system to make it easier to identify the correct labels going into the print tracking calculations. I don’t have a Zebra or DYMO label printer so I am just stuck finding a work around currently.

As far as we know, at least when we developed this, it wasn’t possible to interface with the Brother printers directly the same way that we can with DYMO and Zebra.

Doing a little research anew here, it seems to be relatively new (I think after we released our initial update that added support for DYMO and Zebra). There seems to be a new community-made library, I think after we released our initial update that added support for DYMO and Zebra. They say it is a “high-level API for interfacing with the Brother BPASDK” and that is based on JavaScript. It’s something we could potentially use in the browser.

I don’t know if it’s something we could use or use easily in the same way that we can with the DYMO and Zebra JavaScript SDKs. The reason we only have support for these is that Zebra and DYMO provide official JavaScript libraries or SDKs, which we can use to interface with the printers on the local network. This is needed and you need to have something more than just connecting to the printers via this library. You need to have some software on your machine that the library can interface with, because through our website we are not simply allowed to do API calls to your local network. That would result in a bunch of issues unless it’s facilitated through a proper SDK and a local client running on your device.

Whether such a client exists for Brother that we can use in the same way that we can for DYMO Connect and Canto Browser Print, I do not yet know. This is not the first time we’ve been asked but it’s the first time that I see that there’s a bit of hope for this. Normally we have just said, “No, that doesn’t seem to be possible.”

There would also need to be enough people that want this to warrant buying labels and brother label printer to play with - and spending time playing with it of course. If anyone has one they want to send us or want to buy us one then let us know that would definitely help (there’s no shortage of hardware we need to buy for integration-purposes, and we simply cannot buy it all).

I’d give it a 50% chance that it’s possible right now.