On Demand Warning Sticker Printing

I recently discovered that you can get black-on-yellow thermal printer label tape¹, to which my natural first reaction was “think of all the warning labels I could print”.

So I hacked together an on-demand warning sticker printing service while at an old brickworks in Germany. It proved quite popular and rapidly descended into people making custom label requests and me doing hi-speed crappy graphic design.

The printer

It’s a Brother QL-700, but any Brother QL should work fine. They’re inexpensive second hand and there’s no screwing around with drivers thanks to the brotherql project.

The code

Be warned, it looks like it was hacked together in a tent. Because it was.

It’s written in Python/quart and fetches a list of sticker from my webserver, serves a very basic web ui, and shells out to brotherql which handles printing. It’s not at all optimised or tested for mass/concurrent use.

The aftermath

• 45 meters of consumed label tape
• 39 distinctly non-standard warning signs (including Blåhaj, Nix, and Fibre menace)
• Enough generous donations to cover more label tape for next time…

It was a lot of fun. <3