homebridge-brother-printer

Shows a Brother laser or inkjet printer in HomeKit: whether it's printing, whether it needs attention, and how much toner or ink is left. Everything is read locally over SNMP, with no cloud or Brother account.

Generic AirPrint/IPP plugins can't show real toner levels on many Brother printers, because the standard Printer MIB only reports "some remaining". Brother's own SNMP records carry the actual percentages shown on the printer's web page, and this plugin reads those.

Each printer gets these sensors:

• Printer (occupancy sensor): Detected while a job prints. Use it in automations.
• Printer Problem (contact sensor): Open on a jam, open cover, empty tray or other error. Turn on notifications for it in the Home app.
• Toner / Ink (battery level on the Printer accessory): the toner or ink %, with Home's native low-battery alert at or below your threshold. On color printers it shows the lowest color, so the alert fires when any color runs low.
• Toner / ink tiles (optional humidity sensors): the level as a number on its own tile, one per color on color printers.

While the printer can't be reached, all of them show No Response.

Requirements

• A Brother printer with SNMP. Tested on a real MFC-L2750DW, and against SNMP captures from these models (from the brother library, which Home Assistant's Brother integration uses):

  Kind	Models	What's read
  Mono laser	MFC-L2750DW, HL-L2340DW, DCP-L2540DN, DCP-7070DW, DCP-1618W	Toner, drum
  Color laser	DCP-L3550CDW, DCP-9020CDW	Toner per color, drums, belt, fuser, paper feed kit
  Inkjet	MFC-J680DW, MFC-J5110DW, DCP-J132W, DCP-T735DW, MFC-5490CN	Ink per color, ink waste box
  Older / ink tank	HL-2270DW, HL-5350DN, MFC-T910DW	Status, problems, page count; these don't report levels

  Other Brother models generally use the same records. Reports, with the probe output below, are welcome.

• SNMP turned on in the printer's web page: Network → Protocol → SNMP (v1/v2c, read-only is enough). The default community is public.

• A fixed address for the printer: reserve its IP in your router, or use its mDNS hostname (for example brn3c2af4919dfc.local).

• Homebridge 1.6 or later (including 2.x), Node.js 18, 20, 22 or 24.

Installation

Search for Brother Printer in the Homebridge UI's Plugins tab, or run:

npm install -g homebridge-brother-printer

Running it as a child bridge is recommended.

Configuration

Set it up in the plugin's settings screen, or in config.json:

{
  "platform": "BrotherPrinter",
  "printers": [
    {
      "name": "Printer",
      "host": "10.0.4.150"
    }
  ]
}

What the Home app shows

HomeKit has no printer accessory type, so the plugin uses the closest sensors and Home words them its own way:

• The printing sensor reads Detected / Not Detected.
• Low toner or ink is announced as "battery is low". For a clearer message, add a Home automation on that trigger that sends your own notification.
• Home shows only one battery per accessory. With showDrum on, it may show the drum instead of the toner, which is why the drum is off by default. It's still read, and the plugin logs a warning when it nears end of life. Apps like Eve show both.
• The page count is a custom characteristic, visible in Eve, Controller and the Homebridge UI, not in Apple Home.

Levels and low alerts

Brother printers report two readings per supply: a coarse one (the number on the printer's web page and display) and a finer one. The battery and tiles show the coarse one, so they match the printer. A supply counts as low when either reading is at or below lowTonerThreshold, or when the printer itself flags low toner, so a cartridge that shows 10% but is really at 2% still raises the alert.

Printers without level reporting (some older models and ink tank printers) get no battery; status, problems and the page count still work.

Going offline

The time before a printer shows No Response is about offlineAfter × (pollInterval + 10 s), where 10 s is the SNMP timeout. With the defaults that's about 3.5 minutes; pollInterval: 30 with offlineAfter: 1 brings it to about 40 s. With offlineAfter: 1, a single lost packet can make it flash No Response for one poll.

Brother lasers normally still answer SNMP in Sleep and Deep Sleep.

Checking what your printer reports

The package includes a command that prints what the plugin reads:

npx -p homebridge-brother-printer brother-printer-probe 10.0.4.150

Compare tonerPercent with Remaining Life on the printer's web page. If it doesn't match, or values are null, please open an issue with the probe output and your printer model.

Troubleshooting

• "Can't reach … Request timed out": SNMP is off on the printer, the address is wrong, or a firewall blocks UDP port 161. Test from the Homebridge machine with snmpget -v2c -c public <printer-ip> 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0 (from the snmp package).
• Status text in another language: the plugin reads the printer's character set, so the log shows the display text as the printer shows it. Problems and printing are detected from language-neutral status codes, with English display text as a fallback.
• Old printer never connects: set snmpVersion to 1.
• Toner shows 0% with a full cartridge: some non-genuine cartridges aren't recognised by the printer, which then reports no level.

How it works

Brother printers expose maintenance data as packed records in their private MIB (1.3.6.1.4.1.2435.2.3.9.4.2.1.5.5.8, .5.10 and .5.11). Each record is a one-byte code, 0x01, a length byte and a big-endian value; older models use a two-byte current/max form. The main codes:

Printing and problem state come from the standard Host Resources MIB (hrPrinterStatus, hrPrinterDetectedErrorState), with the display text as a fallback.

The record codes follow the brother Python library by Maciej Bieniek (Apache-2.0), and the tests use SNMP captures from its test suite.

License

MIT