CUPS Driver for TSPL-based label printers on the Raspberry Pi
Inspired by this Hackaday post to bring a CUPS driver for TSPL-based printers to armv7-based platforms.
NOTE - This driver is not provided by the printer manufacturer, and is not officially supported. I am not affiliated with any printer manufacturer. I am just a user who was annoyed that his printer wouldn't work on his Raspberry Pi.
There are a number of printers which all seem to share the same underlying hardware/firmware, where drivers are expected to communicate via the "TSPL" printer language. I have only tested this with the one printer I have/use, but many more are expected to work.
NOTE - Have you tested this with any of these printers? Report back if they work, and I'll move them to the "Tested" list
Based on the notes in Proski's modifications, this likely also works with certain printers from the following brands:
If you confirm that this works with a printer from one of these brands, feel free to submit a PR (or issue!) and we'll get it added to the list (and add a ppd file, if available!).
Installing one of these printers (and making it work) requires two steps -- Installing the PPD file into CUPS, and copying the filter (raster-tspl) to the right directory.
To install the PPD file into CUPS, walk through the "Add Printer" workflow. When you get to the last screen (where you are asked to select the model) select "Choose File" under "Or Provide a PPD File", select the appropriate PPD file for your printer, and choose "Add Printer".
PPD files are available in the ppd/ folder of this repo, or can be made by modifying the "official" ppd files provided by the manufacturer (see: Converting PPD Files below).
To determine which filter to install, use uname -a to determine your system architecture.
To install the filter, select the correct filter from the filters directory of this repo, un-gzip it, and sudo cp it to the appropriate location containing your CUPS filters. For me, this means copying it to /usr/lib/cups/filter/
In order for the custom version of raster-tspl included to work, you will need to make some modifications to the ppd file. PPD files are plain text, and can be edited in your plain text editor of choice.
I have included a handful of PPD files in the /ppd directory of this repo -- these changes have already been made in those files.
cupsModelNumber to 20cupsFilter to "application/vnd.cups-raster 0 raster-tspl"The raster-tspl provided in this package is explicitly not the same as the version released by iDPRT (or other manufacturers). The official version is closed source, and as such cannot be recompiled for Raspberry Pis (armv7 or aarch64).
This version instead is based on the official rastertolabel filter, integrating the the modifications made by Proski to create a suitable filter that functions for the printers listed above.
The armv7 filter is compiled against the version of CUPS that I have installed on my Raspberry Pi (which I believe is the default that comes with Buster).
The aarch64 filter is compiled against the proski cups repository mentioned above. Specifically, this revision:
commit bfdcaad258f58ab512da0bdc1457dc963a25cf8c
If you are interested in seeing the specific code modifications that were required to make this work, take a look here.
The filter automatically converts grayscale images to black and white by applying a threshhold. The original modifications made by Proski use a different threshhold than I selected, and therefore I expect there may be printers out there for which the threshhold I selected may not work.
If you experience this, open an issue on GitHub and I will see about recompiling a new filter with the original threshholds.
100% of the credit for this goes to Proski. All I did was compile it for my specific version of CUPS and host a binary here with instructions.