Hi. Well, it had to happen. Eventually, Drm or Digital Rights Management has come for paper. If you're familiar with your inkjet printers or your laser toner cartridges with their chips installed that try to force you to buy the manufacturer's inks and the manufacturer's toner cartridges, Well, Dymo who's one of the leading makers of Uh label printers for like the consumer space and also like you know, small scale business uh, type space as well.

They are now putting Rfid chips in the paper rolls themselves so that when you buy one of their new printers, they've just released a new range of them. And if you use one of the, buy one of these new printers, if you're stupid enough to buy one of these new printers, you are forced to use Dymo labels. You can't just go buy third-party ones. And if you've got a huge stock of third-party ones or even old genuine Dymo stock that you had in the past, you can't use it.

They will not operate unless you've got the Rfid chip installed in them. Unbelievable. Why anyone would want to bo now buy a Dymo printer is beyond me. Anyway, there's an article here I'll link down below.

You can check it out from the Eff the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I am a card carrying member of. Highly recommended. They do some great work. Um, and how yeah.

Dymo are now putting in Drm into paper and you've seen these before, You've probably got one, you've probably used it. I've got two of these myself. One I found in the dumpster by the way are the old 450 turbo model, but they've released this new 550 model. I think it's been out for a little while now and also the 5 series as well.

I think there's a 5xl or something, but any any of the 500 or 5xl series now, these all have Drm in them, Digital rights management, and, well, the reviews are not kind. Let's have a look. and this is just the Australian. uh.

office supplies. Uh place. Office Works and Dymo are like in crisis mode trying to actually respond to these reviews. Yeah, One star reviews down here.

Do Not Buy This Label printer. If you have been using the previous model of this printer with non-dymo brand labels, then prepare for pain and suffering. All your old consumables and genuine and third party are 100 in compatible. Avoid at all costs are being locked into genuine consumables? mean Dynamo can up the price and you'll have no other option.

This is entirely true. I do not know why anyone in their right mind would buy one of these new dyno printers, but Daimo are getting desperate. Here's an official Dymo response: Hello, this is Kasia from Dymo Customer Care. We apologize.

Our product has not met your expectations. I would like to inform you that new generation labels have been on the market for over a year, thus superseding the availability of older generation labels. So what they've done. They had, uh, prepared this like a long time in advance and They actually seeded the market with new stocks of labels that contain the Rfid chips.

They seeded the market before they actually released these printers. It was all part part of their plan so they'd hopefully avoid um, complaints like this. that, uh, like all my old Dymo labels, don't work. So they waited a year, seeded the market, and then released the products so that you can hopefully wouldn't get any complaints.

Nobody likes this. Trapped into buying Dymo Only labels locks up. Only bought to replace a printer that died suddenly, got at home and can't use any of my old labels because the new one forces you to use Dymo's new labels. Another response from Dymo.

Whoa there, Johnny. On the spot. The exclusive use of original Dymo labels with a 550 series of printers emerge from needs of our customers who have been experiencing various issues with third-party labels. Ah, the customers have been begging for this.

Please daddy, lock us in to your genuine labels. We don't wanna accidentally buy any third-party labels which might have superior adhesion. They might have superior other uh, properties, surface finishes, colors, and all sorts of things that are not available from Dymo. By the way, Dymo has decided to move our customers away from unfortunate experiences with our devices.

Ah, it's for our own benefit. didn't you know Dymo? Genuine label recognition sensors help our customers with a better printing and labeling experience. Unless, of course. yeah, as I said, you want like a different type of adhesive, a different type of label, a different color, a different texture, a different you know, finish or whatever.

Um, yeah, no, no more. Gotta buy genuine. If you get one of these things, I guarantee it's going to be cheaper to actually throw this in the bin immediately or use it as a doorstop or something because you don't want extra e-waste For absolutely ditch the thing and go and buy another brand because you're going to be stuck into buying the Dymo labels forever here in Australia. Oh look, Bulk buy price for only 37.95 That's only 17 cents per label.

So what can you buy these? Excellent, By the way, I've never had an issue with third-party labels. Ever. I don't know anyone who has an issue with third-party labels Ever. because that's just they just want to make extra money from the labels.

They just want to own the label markup with their Drm technology. Anyway, what can you buy them for on ebay? For the previous versions of the Uh printers? Um, they're 15 bucks for four rolls That works out to uh 1.7 cents per label instead of 17 cents. So that's an order of magnitude cheaper. and I get free postage.

So who is Dymo? Well, they're actually owned by Newell Brands. Um, who I'd never heard of. But look who? they own? They own Rubbermaid Systema, they own Dymo Elmer's Expo Whiteboard. You know, I use their whiteboard, markers, papermate? uh, Parker Pens, Sharpies.

Exacto. Wow. They own like everything and everybody. and they're just going.

Oh yeah, let's just put Drm in the papers because we can own the market. We can just extract ring out some more revenue from the customer. No, what you've actually done is destroyed your business. Your nobody in their right mind now, is going to buy a Dymo printer when you are forced into buying these consumables at an order of magnitude more cost than what you can just get the cheapies on ebay for.

And these work fantastically. So I reckon the best thing to do to fight back against this is to simply not buy these new Dymo printers. get the old model if you can, secondhand or whatever. If you still got like software that integrates uh with the Dymo printer, it would be cheaper to physically throw this in the bin and buy any other brand.

But once you go through just a couple of rolls, you've already paid for a new third-party printer. and then the labels are an order of magnitude cheaper than Dymo. So we have to stop this Drm and that is the best way to do it. The best way is not to hack these things.

Uh, to bypass them. Not to wait until you know third-party manufacturers come out with a cloned fake Rfid chip in them. No, the best thing to do is tell Dymo no I'm not going to use your new printer's piss off. and then hopefully no other manufacturers are going to try this Drm thing on paper labels.

And here's another reason why you don't want to be locked in to a single manufacturer of these labels. Not only is the price and order of magnitude higher, which is enough reason already, but what happens if I don't know? You know supply chain breaks down, maybe and you can't get the genuine stuff? You're like you're stuck. Um, this never happened, right? right? Oh, Cannon tells customers to break its printer cartridge Drm due to chip shortage. Anyway, I've got one of these things.

so let's have a look and verify what they're actually doing here. And check out the pissant little roll that you get in the actual brand new printer box. Unbelievable. This is the normal size roll that you'd get.

Come on, they're just taking the piss. Really, that's just unbelievable. Anyway, you can verify that these things have an Rfid tag in them. Um, I'll put a photo up here that somebody else has taken because this is the only role I've got that's um, yeah.

embedded like at right at the end of the roll on the cardboard uh tube thing. And what you can get is just your shoe phone like this with an Rfid reader in it. and you get the Nxp Rfid reader app. I'll link that one down below as well.

It's uh, free and we can put it up and Nxp Ic detected. We've got all the info. Let's check it out. I've actually uh, got two results.

The one on the left hand side here is the original one I got straight out of the box before I printed anything and then what I did is put the paper in, but I didn't print anything. I just advanced the paper by one because I wanted to check if they actually write to the Rfid tag. I.e could you just like buy one of these genuine roles, unroll it, rip out the Rfid tag, and just you know, stick it on a new role, or stick it on the case of the product so that it just always thinks there's a new role there. Unfortunately, they've thought of that.

You can't. They write to this Rfid tag and once it gets, uh down, it counts the number of labels on there. It comes pre-configured with the number of labels on the role. This one tells me that it had, you know, 50 something labels on it and then once it gets down to zero.

yeah, you can't use that tag anymore. The bastards. So here it is. They actually use an Nxp semiconductors um, Sli X2 chip which is, uh, this one and it's got all sorts of you know security things out the wazoo.

Although people have been talking about this online and it's not the best securities. So yeah, I think eventually you're going to get somebody on the market selling labels that have cloned copies of these Rfid chips. Just like you can get the cloned um ink cartridges and toner cartridge chips as well. but at the moment, um, they're not available at all.

Anyway, it is, um, password protected. Some people have, uh, figured that out, you know it's got. yeah, it's got all these security, uh, features and stuff like that in there. and there it is.

There's a block diagram for those playing a log at home because we're interested in the technical details. So it's got. you know, any collision stuff and access control and E-squared Prime. And it's got the built-in memory and you just have the antenna in there little rectifier which generates enough power to power the chip.

There you go. Little three pin jobby like that and somebody has figured out that dimer are actually using a slightly different chip to what you can buy in production, some different variant or something like that I believe, which doesn't or which has something enabled or something unenabled or something like that. So it's doing password protection stuff here. It's got lock status.

I don't know what these things are, I haven't looked in any detail, but yeah, it's it. looks like it's locked or whatever. There's a destroy command. I wonder if that actually does anything, whether they enable that at the end of the roll and they just whoop.

kill the Um Rfid chip because uh, people have confirmed that. Yeah, once these get to zero. Um, you can't use them again. And here's the actual uh, memory content stump.

This is the actual uh part number for this role. Um, so Seven, Two Twenty Four hundred. So seven, Two twenty four hundred label. And sure enough, that's the actual uh, dymo online part number.

That's how it's able to auto detect the things. So this is all. uh, plain text. So as I said, this is the contents after I change.

You see the only differences are the time up here and if we go down the bottom. The interesting thing that's changed is this C0 bit here. So this seems to be password protected. This is the register.

Um, that they're actually looks like they're storing the count of the label in. So it changes from C6 here to C7 over here. So it's counting upwards. Um, don't know why.

That's just how they're implemented in software. Whatever. But yeah, every time you advance the label or print a label, it advances yet again. So and presumably once in, the software gets down to zero labels.

then meh, it's rendered useless. Presume that like there could be like an individual serial number uh, per chip. I haven't actually looked at the full data sheet in in depth and figured out, try to figure out how it all works. It doesn't matter.

I don't care, I'm just simply going to refuse to buy any new Dymo products so I couldn't give a rat's ass, but some people might Anyway, let's do a tear down of the real thing and have a look inside because we're not interested in hacking this thing. we're just interested in looking at how all this sort of stuff works. Anyway, we have our flash here and it says, uh, not in printer. Um, so let's put our roll in.

hasn't detected yet. I probably got to close the lid. whack it in there. I guess I gotta press it.

it's not detecting. Hello Mcfly. Seriously unbelievable. Ah, there we go.

I just advanced it new. uh, label type detected. so I didn't actually send the command obviously to read the tag unless I advanced it. Yeah, the S0722400 that is correct.

Okay, let's print something. Uh yeah. and Dymo does actually suck And you can see it says there I've got 49 remaining and well, just wasted one. I'm feeding it forward unfortunately.

All right, let's take this heap of crap apart. It's uh, very similar to the 450 Turbo. There's really no difference, except they've added the Drm and it's slightly faster. Whoopty freaking do.

Check it out. It's new and improved. Yes daddy, please lock me in with the Drm And it only works with authentic Dymo labels, so they do actually tell you on the box. But anyway.

um yeah. if you open it up once again, they do have another warning label in here requires authentic Dymo original. Four screws on the bottom here. Kind of sort of gets us into this turd.

All right. So we've got uh, drive motor here. We've got the print head. uh, down the bottom, there looks like these ribbons go also go off to the Uh print head so they're like, I don't know.

reading something back. I assume that the uh ribbon? nice, nice and beefy for uh, the like power required to drive the printhead. Because this is a thermal printer, of course, it requires a significant amount of current to like, uh, heat up the individual uh elements in the thing. and uh, this ribbon just goes off to the front panel.

And then here's where the evil happens. right down there. We got a newbie. so there's our two boards.

I'll put, uh, high-res photos of these over on my Flickr account. There's an St Arm processor down there, and, well, you know, not much else really. And down here it looks like we might have a serial port. uh, that looks to be the Jtag and we've got a switch there.

Maybe it does something. boot mode switch. Maybe you can see the date code down here from 2020. So that was like a year before they actually released this thing.

But you know, takes a lot of effort to, uh, put in the design effort required to screw over the customers. You'd be surprised. So I've added two little Smd switches. I found a second footprint over here and I found these as a serial line, transmit, receive, and ground and I'm tapping off a 3.3 volt line as well see if we can get any like boot up code or anything.

The bad news, unfortunately is that I can't get anything out of this uh boot serial port at all. The boot button here does absolutely nothing. The reset button does actually work. You press that and you can actually reset on the machine put in standby.

but no combination of the boot buttons with the front panel buttons do absolutely anything at all. I don't even get a single transition out of the serial port here, so that almost certainly indicates that the Str micro in here has been put into protected mode, which disables all of the uh debug interfaces and stuff like that, as well as actually protects you getting the code back out of the micro. So the only thing left to probe is the I Squared a C interface going across here. That'll do the trick All right.

I got the logic analyzer hooked up. There were four lines, two were I squared C, one what looks like an interrupt outline and another line which I didn't bother uh, tracing out. But I hooked it up. So and here it is.

I've just got it. Uh, free running here. We've got a packet like every I count that every second. There's no paper in there at the moment.

so if I press the feed forward button and it does, it doesn't seem to change like anything. So let's put the roll in. Oh oh hello. That changed the top one, which was just the interrupt line.

This is now significantly changed and we've gotten it. Looks like we've got an extra packet over here with the roll in. So that's interesting because before what was, uh, happening with no paper installed, there was just this interrupt pulse. It was in pretty much that exact location.

It went high like that. but then it. It just stayed low the rest of the time. But now it like transitions like 17 milliseconds later there it transitions back high and it, um, and then it goes low like you know at some time.

after this and we get an extra little packet. A little bonus packet here. Now I've got the I Squared C uh decoding on. I'm not sure I've got it absolutely correct yet.

There seems to be like a little runt pulse in there that's only 500 nanoseconds so I'm not sure what's doing there. I did change the sample rate and it didn't seem to make a difference. it's still capturing it. I mean, I've got really short leads, so I don't think there's a signal integrity issue there.

So I believe this line here is the interrupt line. Uh, but unfortunately it's got a fairly. The chip has a fairly complex interrupt controller in it, so it we don't like. It's fully firmware programmable to do a ton of stuff, so I couldn't tell you what it's actually.

you know, signifying, you'd have to spend a lot of time to actually play around with this to figure out what's going on here. But of course, in theory, you could replace this board with something that just simulated the I Squared C signals and uh, the microcontroller unless it's like, very cleverly signed. And this chip does support a, uh, secure key interface over the I Squared C or something. So so it might be hard to like, just simulate the Rfid board.

Um, because a lot of people have, uh, talked about this. You know, I just throw an Arduino in there or something and and you can just output I squared ceasing signals to simulate it. But yeah, I'd like. It's probably possible, but it's going to require you know, a significant amount of decoding work to figure out what's going on here.

Anyway, let's start that going again. and I'm going to advance the paper. Whoa. It just oh no.

Whoa. Oh, it's printing. Dymo sucks. Dymo sucks.

Um, I I just wasted. Uh, well. no, I didn't waste two labels. There's two labels well spent.

So um, I think I was playing around with the software before maybe and that was a print buffer thing. So let me do this live. Actually. Okay, so we have the paper in and let's just physically remove the paper.

See, it definitely changed. Like I told you before, the single inner up there and there's no pre packet over here. You see that whereas if we put the paper in, there is a pre packet. So interesting, huh? So that interrupt is doing that? What's going on there? I don't know.

I don't see this other line down here doing anything, so I don't know what that is. But yeah, it pulls every second. and if I just physically put that in there, Boom. it.

Whoa. Whoa. We got a lot of interrupts there for a few. well for one Uh packet there and then it goes.

Then it kicks in and if I remove it again, boom, It goes like that. And if I stick it in. Yeah, yeah, so it's figuring out. it's obviously doing some negotiation there.

getting all the data, reading the data from the new label, it seems fairly consistent. Yeah, that's that's pretty consistent. So that's reading out the initial data from the Uh label. and after that, it's just doing.

its. uh, just periodic things. So so yeah, you'd have to go in and figure out which of the actual Uh commands what it's actually doing and tell you that with the data sheet of both the Rfid chip and uh, what's going on inside the Um Nfc receiver chip as well. I kept saying Rfid in this.

I don't know, I'm 125 kilohertz guy. you know Nfc Rfid? Yeah, Same difference. So anyway, we'll leave it at that. I'll link in the Ev blog forum down below if you want to discuss this and put your findings and stuff up there.

But you know eventually you might get Um Dymo labels that are compatible. But I they are not available yet and who knows, maybe no one will bother because nobody's buying this heap of crap and I don't recommend you buy this heap of crap. As I said, it is cheaper to simply even if you accidentally bought this one as a replacement for an old one and you realize you know, no, No, I'm stuck buying the Bloody Dymo labels in order of magnitude higher price. Throw the thing in the bin immediately, or use it as a door stop and then go and buy any other brand.

Doesn't matter. I use a Zebra one. They're probably like they're fairly reasonably expensive like you know, professional type ones, but a lot of people like the brother ones. and there's all sorts of other brands.

There's tons of them out there. Simply do not buy Dymo anymore. That's it. They're done.

They completely killed their business with this Drm and certainly let them know in the reviews of this, because, well, people need to know this. These things should be downvoted to one star everywhere. It's just an absolute joke. Anyway, hope you found the interesting If you did, give it a big thumbs up and discuss down below.

Catch you next time you.