Hello everyone!
I signed up to:
1. Thank everyone involved for doing god's work and letting me use a machine I paid for as I see fit.
2. Report my experience / findings as I didn't see them outlined here exactly.
Here's how it went:
1. I bought the machine (5XL) mid-December off Amazon, flashed 1.1.1 on Bluepill and it immediately worked fine.
2. A day or two (and less than 10 labels) later it started showing up as empty on Dymo software.
3. The
only way to get it to print was to send labels to print, get the empy error, then turn it off and on, it would print all labels then start flashing again.
4. Today I decided to dig up a solution, found this thread, opened it up again and looked for the two pins to short... but the chip wasn't there.
5. I found it hiding on the bottom of the board, joined the pins, and the printer has correctly been reporting 219 labels and online for a few hours now... fixed?
PCB says RevD
Adding a couple photos, maybe it's useful to someone, thanks again and... see you next time it stops working

EDIT: Welp the issue came back again, guess I'll lurk around and wait for a fix lol.
EDIT2: Actually uhh it seems to be working fine now, so maybe the write protect did the trick after all.