Sticky Icky – a ditherpunk sticker designer for the Zebra LP2844

Name: Sticky Icky – a ditherpunk sticker designer for the Zebra LP2844
Availability: InStock
Author: sigspec

by sigspec·May 20, 2026·3 points·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●●BangerNiche GemWizardryCozy

XOR compositing and EPX upscaling turn $40 thermal printers into art machines.

Strengths

•Five distinct dithering algorithms including Riemersma Hilbert-curve implementation.
•Binary-search font sizing ensures address blocks perfectly fit label dimensions.
•Diagnoses and bypasses broken GW raster firmware via serial FastAPI backend.

Weaknesses

•Requires a Python backend; not a purely static browser-based solution.
•Workflow assumptions may be specific to the author's firmware version.

Post Description

Browser-based sticker designer for a Zebra LP2844 thermal label printer. I bought an $40 UPS branded LP2844 to print stickers and ended up building this after I couldn't find existing tools that did what I wanted.

GW raster appears to be broken over USB on firmware V4.29, so it prints over serial from a FastAPI backend. More notes on what I ran into are in the README. Image pipeline does XOR compositing, EPX upscale, Otsu/manual threshold, and five dithering algorithms (Bayer 4x4/8x8, Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Riemersma).

Part of this was just an experiment to see if I could use Claude to diagnose the print issues I was running into. Some of the conclusions in the project may be entirely wrong, or entirely specific to my setup. I've arrived at a workflow that works for me but may be based on wrong assumptions. Would love for someone else with an LP2844 to test it out.