Since mid-2020, the garden beekeeper has been tinkering with a machine that should apply the labels in exactly the same way as he used to stick them on the jars by hand: A single main label should cover all honey varieties, while the information on the variety and the best-before date are found on the guarantee strip, which is printed on the home laser printer. The warranty strip should be applied vertically to the jar and lid by the machine, and then the main label should be glued crosswise to the jar.

In the first design of the labeler, the self-adhesive main label was to come from a roll, then the warranty strip was to be fed individually from the side under the main label and pressed against the adhesive side from below before both labels were applied together to the glass.

Initial prototypes were developed for a single sheet feed of the warranty strip and a photoelectric sensor to detect the exact position and to detect duplicate warranty strips ("paper jam"), and a first rudimentary version of the program code was programmed.

However, after presenting this design and discussing it with the Hani-Mandl developer team, it was discarded in favor of a much simpler approach in which the label and guarantee strip are purchased in one piece from a print shop. With this solution, the best-before date is stamped on by a date stamp as part of the labeling process. For the Heilbronn Garden Honey application, therefore, a separate label with printed variety designation is required for each honey variety, but the effort involved seemed justifiable since there are only 2 honey varieties so far.

The rough functional design of this machine is outlined under the name "EttiMandl, semi-automatic honey jar labeler" on this page. 

In the meantime, the Hani-Mandl developer team already has several, but very different prototypes, some of which are already in productive use. They do not differ significantly in the basic functional principle, but e.g. in the construction (wooden construction with skateboard wheels, modified China hand labeler), in the type of drive (stepper or DC motor), the microcomputer (ESP32 or Arduino Nano), the type and number of labels (simple main label, main label with warranty strip, 2 labels on front and back) and of course in the program code.  

When developing such a machine in a virtual team, everyone contributes his specific knowledge and skills. Ideas are discussed, tips and help are given, experiences and results are shared. Everyone benefits from the others, perhaps a final, joint design is created, or in the end everyone builds " his own", tailor-made favorite machine :-)

On the basis of this prototype, not only was the principle functioning demonstrated, but above all a whole series of ideas for improvements were developed, which were implemented in the second prototype.

The objective for the second prototype was to create a visually appealing device using 3D printed parts to a large extent. The dimensions were to be such that all parts could be printed with the Anycubic I3 Mega S. This proved to be a challenging requirement, but resulted in a remarkably compact device:

Prototype in action:

Although functional in principle, this version also showed considerable potential for improvement, especially on the design side.

In the meantime, a long list of corrections / improvements has been incorporated into the design. The parts for the third prototype are currently being manufactured. 3D printing all the plastic parts requires about 1kg of raw material and takes just under a week. 

Continuation