ussjoin / milm

Maternal Integrated Lactation Marker (MILM)

Maternal Integrated Lactation Marking system (MILMs)

Purpose

Producing timestamped human breast milk medical labels to apply to milk storage units (e.g., bags, bottles).

What? Why?

Everyone who is currently lactating with the intent to feed needs to timestamp milk to ensure it's used oldest-to-newest. (If you need to know why that's important, go Google it.) Some people need to be able to do that and apply labels that are readable by a hospital's scanning system.

If you don't need to do the medical thing, then this is probably a bit overkill, but feel free to customize it for your own uses. Replace the barcodes with a Star Wars pun!

No, srsly though, why?

I'm a cis male, so the support I can provide in the lactation process is somewhat limited: I can bring food and beverages, and I can handle supplies. As part of the latter, I needed to add time and date stamping to a (otherwise pre-printed) label. I did this using a Sharpie.

As any good technologist knows, however: why use a $0.30 Sharpie when you can use a $100 label printer, a Raspberry Pi, a three-key USB keyboard, and various bits and bobs?

If you get that keyboard, by the way, the keys default to 1 2 and 3 respectively, so you don't need to bother with reprogramming it.

License

Lee Brotherston's "Lee's Shitheads Prohibited Licence," https://github.com/LeeBrotherston/leecence/blob/master/LSHPL.txt , except for Roboto-Medium.ttf which is released under the Apache license: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto

Usage

Get the non-Python requirements: sudo apt install ghostscript imagemagick (or as necessary for your environment)

If you're installing on a new RasPiOS-Lite image, add git python3-pip at least, and (for your own sanity) I'd suggest screen vim as well.

Check out this repo: git clone https://github.com/ussjoin/milm.git

Get into the folder: cd milm

Get the python requirements: sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Optionally but you almost definitely want to do this: vim milm_config.py to change the settings to the label you need.

NOTE: If you change the barcodedata inputs, you MUST delete the two .png files in the directory or they won't be regenerated. (This is to let a low-power server only do the generation once.)

To run:

./milm.py

Press CTRL-C to quit, or any other key to print a label.

To deploy in a useful way: set a Raspberry Pi to boot logged-in to the command line (you can use raspi-config to do that) and then put the invocation in .bashrc.