Heat Shrink Labels

To aid in wiring the vehicle connections and in future debugging and maintenance, all the cables will have heat shrink labels applied to them as this is a very clean way to label the wires.

Heat shrink labels are typically expensive, but we can buy knockoff labels relatively cheaply and make them work with our Brother label maker with a small modification.

The Brother P-Touch H110 label maker that we have requires a piece of tape to cover the leftmost hole on the cartridge to print on the heat shrink labels to correctly identify it, as shown in the image below.

The heat shrink labels that we purchased are from Aliexpress:

6mm black on yellow, and 12mm black on yellow: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001839632629.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.6ad64c4diC1FFP

An image of the labels applied to the battery module wiring test jig. This is using the MEDIUM text size on the label maker.

 

The label maker by default adds a couple centimeters to the length of the label before and after the text is printed. This is a waste of the heat shrink cartridge. We can eliminate this space by printing a very long label with multiple wire names on it (put 2 spaces between each wire name) and then cut then apart after printing it out.

 

References:

These 2 videos on the Voltlog youtube channel were helpful in figuring this out. Screenshot above from the 2nd video link.

Voltlog #237 - Can You Print Shrink Tube Labels With A Cheap Brother Printer?

Voltlog #238 - Finally Printing Shrink Tube Labels With A Brother Printer