Dymo Rides Again With This Dot-Matrix Label Embosser
For a five-year-old future Hackaday scribe, there could be no greater day than that on which a Dymo label maker appeared in the house. With its spinny daisy-wheel to choose a character and its squeezy handle to emboss the letter into the plastic tape, there would follow a period of going nuts kerchunking out misspelled labels and slapping them on everything. Plus the things look like space guns, so there would have been a lot of pew-pewing too.
This Dymo dot-matrix label maker bears no resemblance to our long-lost label blaster, but it’s pretty cool in its own right. The product of collaborators [Felix Fisgus] and [Timo Johannes] and undertaken as a project for their digital media program, the only thing the labeler has in common with the Dymos of old is the tape. Where the manual labelers press the characters into the tape with a punch and die, their project uses a dot-matrix approach. Messages are composed on an old PS/2 keyboard through an Arduino and a 16×2 LCD display, and punched onto the tape a dot at a time. The punch is a large darning needle riding on the remains of an old CD drive and driven by a solenoid. When it comes time to cut the label, servo driven scissors do the job. It’s a noisy, crazy, Rube Goldberg affair, and we love it. Check it out in action in the video below.
We applaud [Felix] and [Timo] for carrying the torch of embossed label making. It’s a shame that we’ve turned to soulless thermal printers to handle most of our labeling needs; then again, we’ve seen some pretty neat hacks for those too.
9 thoughts on “Dymo Rides Again With This Dot-Matrix Label Embosser”
A little rubber stopper would go along way to deaden the sound of the banging. Great build.
And you’d lose some of the charm.
I don’t think this contraption was made to be perfect. Perhaps more of an artwork project… making noises when typing on the keyboard. The thing that really make me like this were the wiggly eyes, nice touch. Good to see old labeling tech being revived in a fun and functional manor.
Fun project.
Now that’s a label maker!
None of this quiet little printing on the thermostat tape.
This is a loud thwacking and industrial buzzing label maker. Nothing matches the satisfaction of the embossed labels. So satisfying that you get to press them down again after the predetermined {glue adhesion/spring-loaded curvature of the plastic tape} time.It probably takes the same amount of time as a manual one, if not maybe even a little quicker….👍
And you should be able to emojis 😇Dymo has a habit of discontinuing some great products. They have a superb business card reader/scanner called the CardScan that works fantastically, sorting all of the data in the correct order, no matter what the order is on the original card or the fancy font that may be used. The lettering can even be in color and/or embossed, metallic, white-on-black, one side or two sides, whatever. And, you can add data that is not even on the card, or change data that should be updated. Unfortunately, they are discontinuing it at the end of this year (a little over two months from now) after which they will no longer support it. Replacement? Nope.
The last time I received a business card was…. mmm…. well I don’t remember.
The last time I gave a business card was…. I didn’t even bother printing cards anymore.
This is something that would scrap even the best ever product.
What’s with this ‘old’ crap? Author tries to make Dymo Embosser sound obsolete or no longer made. Booo! Like the machine though. Think it should be louder and use aluminum or soft steel tape. Maybe a series of 16 trip hammers with massive flywheel.
Could that be a start for dymo-ing in braille?
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