Label Printer Niimbot D110

Niimbot D110 - a pretty good buy.At a price that puts it into the class of the Dymo thermal labellers, this is a pretty capable machine. 

I bought this little Niimbot D110 printer three years ago. I needed to label parts bins and drawers, and found dozens of uses for the labels besides. (I got waterproof labels because there was a deal for the printer and four rolls. Each roll has a strip of 210 labels.) The whole deal, printer and labels, came in at AUD$48 back then in 2021. 

Labelmania. Of Course.

You know how it is. You get a label printer, you label everything in sight and then look around for more. First thing I printed a label for was the printer itself, with a return phone number if I ever lost it. The printer's been carted around in bags and pockets but the sticker is still shiny and as legible as when I printed it. (I won't post a pic of it yet because there's more, so much more...)

If I left it unused for a few weeks - yes, that did happen sometimes - the first label would stick and print misaligned. I could live with that, just hit print a second time and the next label would be perfect. 

I am so happy with it that I made a graphic for this article. Since I had to change the label roll, and then realised that it was the first roll change, I thought I'd give it this article for a Refill Day gift... That's when I realised that it uses RFID paper disc labels to tell the printer what label stock is inside. 

It doesn't have a label counter, but a spare roll is the size of ... of ...  - let's just say that a mini can of Sprite would be too big to sit on it. And well packed in a sealed foil bag. The centre piece there is smaller than a soft drink bottle lid. And the printer's about the size of two decks of cards stacked atop.

But Does It Come In All Different Colours? 

(And props to whoever gets that reference...)

No. It's a thermal printer so two colours is all, the label material and the thermal ink material. You can also get rolls of cutesy labels that are printed with hearts or unicorns or kittens and the thermal ink prints through, but I needed labels, durable labels, and the water/oil proof ones were the duck's guts as far as I was concerned. 

Well Then Does It Come With An App?

Oh yeah. The worst thing about the app is that your labels can be saved to the cloud, and if you lose your password then any labels on that account are yote forevva... (yep - bitter experience talking there, upgraded phone, downloaded new copy of app - and bugga...)

But that app. It takes a few labels to get it right but once you do, it can do tricks. Also - resolution and sharpness. Bear in mind that a label is 15 x 30 mm in size:

These blew me away. The top image is a small section out of a phone camera shot I cut out and pasted into the editor app, on a day when I just happened to be going to the hospital for day surgery. I didn't reduce colours, I just let the app decide what would be black and what smudges on the wall would be considered white. That sticker's been on the lower bezel of my monitor since Feb 2022. 

The lower image has two stickers, the top one from 2021 when I labelled the label printer, the second when I realised that I could print smaller URL QR codes and they could be read by most modern phone cameras. Don't worry - I was Not An Expert at that stage and managed to prepend some garbage to the URL, and the server I set up was a test server so it probably won't work by now. But it's a 14-character piece of text and my phone can read it perfectly well even now after scraping along on the printer for the last few years.

Guerilla Marketing

I think the QR code was the eye-opener for me. Nothing Dymo produces comes close to how useful the D110 is. And I think that the particular QR code I used was for a "leave your contact details" page or something. I can't remember, my online strategy was all "suck it and see" still. But it included an email and the mobile number again. I think. It could also just have been a "Hello World!" page.

But later when I had a few tools to sell off, I printed six stickers pointing to another temporary page with a picture, a price, and my phone number. For a spare set of calipers, a screwdriver set I'd never used, that sort of thing. At that stage I was constrained by not even thinking about using URL shorteners to keep the QR code readable at that tiny (~12-13 mm square) scale. 

I also printed a few guerilla marketing stickers for a local fruit & veg grocer but because they had an phone from last century their camera couldn't focus so they didn't use them. When the person was going bust, I showed him how any modern phone camera could resolve the advert, and sadly went back to having to drive miles to farm gates and farmer's markets for reasonable quality fresh F&V.

As I said, my breakthrough for that came with ReBrandly.com, another URL shortening service like bit.ly. BTW ReBrandly is one of the few I know that lets you create a URL shortening service with a domain name you already own in the free tier. That's very unusual. 

(Disclaimer: I'm not posting this for gain. I just started using ReBrandly a few months ago and realised that they offer such a lot on the Free tier that despite them being slightly more costly than the older Bitly, if my donations go up to the point where I can do so I'll definitely be paying tier to them. Oh and yep that's definitely a hint for you to scroll down and seriously consider if you'd like to donate the price of a few lattes a month to me. Bear in mind that as coffee prices go up over the next few months, that'll equate to just the cost of one cappuccino a month. That's a really good investment considering I post between ten and twenty articles a month...)

Check It Out

Anyhow - Niimbot make a few label printers as you'll have seen if you followed any of the links I've strewn around the page, and searching for them on AliExpress and selecting a store with a good reputation you might even get a better deal than I did. To get the durable labels, search for "water oil proof 15 x 30 210 pcsW" or something similar on whatever store you got the printer from. Hint: Buying a 3-pack always works out cheaper, and as they arrive well-sealed in a pouch, they look like they could well outlast civilisation itself.

Okay - I'm off to stick labels on things.

Before I go, check out the section below. It has various magical properties, like letting you copy the URL of this page to share, bookmarking it to remember later, a rolled-up newspaper icon to let you check out a list of my latest twenty articles and subscribe to a once-a-week newsletter, and a few ways you can donate and help me out with running the online presence and subscriptions to news sources I use for researching. 

Ciao!

Lithos'd

Technology goes round and around. Take our ways of capturing moments. From scratching lines on the ground or on a rock, to the great little cameras that almost everyone carries with them in their phone.

Leaving aside rock paintings (even though some of these were detailed and in proportion and even beautiful) We can see the first representations of real world scenes in sketches and paintings, frescos and tapestries. Styles of portraying the scenes varied, but there comes a point where painting a black blob and calling it "The MarketPlace On Saturday" is just not going to cut it. Also, I'm more interested in technological things rather than abstract mind experiments. So I'll stick to roughly the subject of photography.

Brief History Of Photography

History is full of camerae obscura which ranged from a pinhole in one wall of a room and some tracing paper on the wall opposite (Bonus Pratchett Moment: Now we know where Sir Terry Pratchett got his idea of the iconograph which Twoflower the tourist used to capture images on his travels. The gods are bastards!) to the large black boxes that early photographers carted laboriously about on their travels in efforts to capture (slow-moving or hopefully completely still for periods of up to several minutes depending on the medium being used to record the scene including imps with paintbrushes) landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. 

Alphonse Giroux in 1839 built a technology business around the tech of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, from whom the Daguerrotype originated. This seems to be the earliest commercial camera available. (Had to include links to their Wikipedia entries, just look at Louis-Jaques' clothes and the way he must have managed to hold that pose for what? - ten to twenty minutes? Portraits were hard back then...)

The "Kodak Moment" (oh come on - you knew I'd have to use that in an article like this!) came when George Eastman produced imaging film on paper in 1885, then on nicely flammable celluloid the year after he introduced the first camera named Kodak for the general population. Kodak is still the first name many think of when you ask them about film based cameras.

But the original Kodak, despite being inexpensive enough for working people to afford, came with a gotcha. In an early case of flockintech, the Kodak was preloaded with enough film for 100 pictures, and then had to go back to the factory to have that film developed. I guess there weren't too many photo developing houses around then, but you have to wonder if that whole lock-in technology doesn't have at least one root tendril in the Eastman Company... 

Most people can fill in the history here, from Kodak, to Instamatic, to Polaroid (the films of which you are strongly advised not to shake! Thank you Andre3000... 😂) to digital cameras in the 1990s onward, all the way to the device you're probably reading this on, or at least have sitting close by if using a larger device. 

You can - now - get a hard copy of your image by sending it to a colour printer loaded with good inks and photo quality paper. Or you could actively refuse the convenience of a decent digital camera, personal assistant, information manager, web browser, and telephone - and choose a really feature-limited "instant print" style camera that either prints photos directly or by connecting it up to a matched photo printer.

But we're spoilt.

If you wanted a hard copy of an image in Kodak Eastman days you sent the camera away for developing. If you were around at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, you could send your film to a developing house or develop it yourself. 

By 1947, Edwin Land demonstrated the first instant (almost instant) film and the Polaroid Land Camera, which developed the film for you in a minute. There were film cartridges you could send to be developed without needing a film changing bag, and finally in a full circle, "disposable" (actually I believe some brands of them were refilled and sold again, some refilled and given back to you for the cost of developing and refilling) cameras that you sent back to have the film developed. 

So why would we in effect go back to the days of developing our own film?

Introducing: Too Much Technology 

Greetings readers! Today I'm on the subject of lithophanes, those magical Polaroid moments that you only need a decent digital camera, some great art package, a lithophane generator, some nice pale filament, and a 3D printer! To (sort of, almost, depending on your skillz and your printer) instantly have a great picture to give away to friends or whatever. Which they can't see unless you give them a backlighted frame for it. 

So what's the attraction? Aside from all those advantages above, lithophanes are actually fun. They were made up to a century ago, often in engraved ceramics, and later pressed in plastic. You can read about them here. I only ever got to see plastic ones, sucks to be me, I'd have loved to see a hand-engraved ceramic or two. 

They can be lit by anything.

I made a few, and you can too. Take a digital photo with plenty of contrast. Lithophanes are actually a big step backwards in photo resolution and dynamic range, because they can only alter lightness in steps of one layer of 3D printing at a time, and most filament can only provide so much contrast - after a few layers, it's all dark unless you put some high power lighting behind the print. That said, with a good printer and good choice of filament transparency, good use of layers, you can also produce some quite detailed lithophanes.

Use the info above to pick your medium for taking the images and suddenly realise that your phone is well good enough to take the photo you think will work. I also use an art package (Paint.NET) to mess with making the image greyscale and adjusting brightness and contrast until it looks like it might work.

Then you need to convert it into a model you can put into your 3D printer. Most of it will ask you how thick you'll make the layers, and the thinner you can make them, the better, as you'll be able to print more levels of lightness before the plastic gets too thick. 

Dennis Dane made a good litho tool, https://itslitho.com where you can try out a variety of various settings and see a rough idea of what it'll print like. Muck around with settings until you think it'll be decent, and download the file. 

On your printer, the more translucent the filament you use, the more layers you'll be able to print before the light can't get through any more. That said, clear filament won't really work because you'll need too many layers. Most opaque filaments, you'll be working with only about six to ten steps of lightness. Some of the more opaque, you may only get three. This is where you'll spend a bit of time dialling in your filament, layer thickness, and even line width, to get the detail you want.

There's a good range of information on the ItsLitho site I linked above, and more at All3DP. 

Help me find cool stuff! 

Use the links below to copy the URL and share it, the newspaper icon to check my other online publications, and the coffee mug or Paypal logo to make a donation.

You're awesome! Stay tuned - an Appendix of Links is below:

Appendix of Links

Some I've used above, some are bonus links. Enjoy!

Dennis Dane made a good litho tool. https://itslitho.com

A nicer look back at Polaroid https://artincontext.org/history-of-polaroid/

Wikipedia weighs in of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_camera

Another Polaroid retrospective https://mymodernmet.com/history-of-polaroid/

New kids film https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/the-best-instant-cameras

New kids on the instant print scene https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-digital-instant-cameras-hybrid-cameras-and-instant-printers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_camera

https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Twoflower 

https://wiki.lspace.org/Iconograph

 

The Energy, The Money, The Problem

It's always money-grubbing.
 

  

How To Grub Money Out Of Anything

Run one of the largest polluting powerplants in Australia? No problem. Get government money to upgrade it? No problemo! Gimme pronto! Now do what you got the money for, be prepared with enough clean energy to replace your big pile of precambrian forest polluting sh*t? Give us a break guv, we agreed readily to the first two. We need another handout first. Make it a yearly one this time, hey? 

It's like the huge almost Victoria state-wide blackout a few weeks ago. The grid company was taking all the "service" fees from energy operators and sellers for transporting that energy - and pissing it up against the wall, apparently. They certainly didn't use it to maintain six key transmission line towers. Storms took them out in a chain reaction that dropped power system after power system until over half the State was black. 

Some people only got power back almost three weeks after the initial failure. Lord FSM () knows what chewing gum and string they've lashed together to replace those towers... I mean - it begs a few questions does it not? (Pastafarianism icon by Icons8)

Like: If they can suddenly afford to either reassemble the twisted wreckage of them or completely replace them, then WTFSM was the reason for not doing the scheduled maintenance? Surely maintenance would have been cheaper than replacement? And if it wasn't - then why not replace them at a sensible lifespan? Why wait until it totalled life for half a million people and some, for over two weeks? And yeah - opting not to pay for the tens of thousands of dollars' worth of food that was spoiled thanks to their negligence.

I think that maybe the charters of energy companies should be changed. Maybe they should have a condition that for every day or part thereof that their power is unavailable at an end customer's premises they refund a week's worth of "service fee." Some people could be free of service fees until next summer...

I think that maybe for every month they keep using fossil fuels right now, they should pay 20% of their supply tariffs from the offending plant to the government for remedial work to be carried out to undo their damage to the ecosystem. 

And I think that for every month they fail to meet the deadline for whatever they were given a grant or assistance payment, they should forfeit another 5% of their total tariffs for all fossil-fuelled power plants for that month to the government for damages. 

But no government in the world has the guts to do that and stick by it. Meh. We're soooooo screwed...

Do me a favour?

Use the links below to share this post and others like it - let's make Aussies into true blue battlers again. Use the rolled-up newspaper to see what's going on across all my publications, and maybe even the coffee mug or Paypal to flick me a donation. 

... and stay awesome!