Show HN: Sticky Icky – a ditherpunk sticker designer for the Zebra LP2844

3 points

15 days ago

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.