Brother P-Touch Hacking with AVR

What is this?

This is work-in-progress AVR Assembly source code that is designed to drive the TPH (Thermal Print Head) of a Brother P-Touch label printer, to theoretically print any graphics.

I am writing this code to target an Atmel ATtiny13A, to control the TPH of a Brother P-Touch PT-1010 hand-held label printer. The same code should port very easily to a larger ATtiny85A, and is expected to also drive the print head of a PT-1000.

In time this repo will accompany an article that I will later post on my blog: http://anton.maurovic.com/

This work is based, in part, on an article on philpem's blog.

Disclaimer

NOTE that this code is currently just a proof-of-concept and may not work properly, and at this time is NOT CONSIDERED FIT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE OR USE. Use it at your own risk.

How do I load the firmware and test the hardware?

Building the firmware

I installed WinAVR on Windows, which installs avr-gcc (including the avr-as assembler) and avrdude for interfacing with a USBasp to write the firmware to an AVR MCU.

On a Mac, you can use Homebrew to install Lars Immisch's avr-gcc fork:

brew tap larsimmisch/avr
brew install avr-libc

After that you should be able to build the .hex file with:

make rebuild

Burning the firmware to the MCU's Flash ROM

See the burning instructions in earlier examples, including help if you have problems.

Who wrote this?

This was written by Anton Maurovic. You can use it for whatever you like, but giving me credit with a link to http://anton.maurovic.com would be appreciated!