MeowPrinter

Open-source toolkit for BLE thermal cat printers (GB01, PD01, and compatible models)

Features

• Nice UI - draw text, change config, preview with thermal simulation, and more!
• BLE scanning & connection
  
• Print modes — Floyd-Steinberg dithering, halftone (Bayer 4×4), direct threshold
  
• Badge / QR label — auto detects barcodes and qr codes in images and prints them with appropriate size
  
• Multilingual UI — English, Spanish, German, Chinese (4 variants), lolcat
  

Supported printers

Model	Notes
PD01	Fully supported, including PD01-specific tail-feed tuning
GB01, GB02	Standard generation cat printers
GB03	Supports compressed bitmaps (requires_new_start protocol)
GT01, YT01	Standard protocol, fully compatible
MX05, MX06, MX08	Feed-quirk workaround applied automatically
Other cat-printer-compatible models	Very likely to work — try --model GB01 first

Legal disclaimer

This project communicates with thermal printers over Bluetooth Low Energy using a protocol that has been reverse-engineered from publicly observable traffic. I am not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any manufacturer or their official applications. Reverse engineering for interoperability purposes is widely recognised as lawful under applicable law (including EU Directive 2009/24/EC and relevant US case law). No proprietary code, firmware, or assets were copied or redistributed.

Acknowledgements

MeowPrinter builds on the work of many people and projects:

• Cat-Printer by NaitLee — the original open-source cat printer toolkit from which this project was based on. Without it, none of this would have been possible.
• catprinter by rbaron — an early reverse-engineering effort that helped establish the BLE protocol.
• catprinter by rhnvrm — another independent implementation that contributed to protocol understanding.

Author

Github profile: elyez-dev

More information

You can check the source code on Github: MeowPrinter