MakerBot Industries

A few weeks ago, we picked up some old Zebra LP 2844 thermal printers in hopes of using them to print barcodes, packing slips, stickers, and all sorts of other fun stuff. Well, since most of us around here use Ubuntu, we figured it would be awesome to be able to use it with Linux.

Okay, sounds easy… well, how do you do it? First off, the printer we have only has serial and parallel ports. Crap. Undaunted, I order a USB to Serial cable that uses the good old FTDI chip. I manage to add it as a printer in Ubuntu, and go to print a test page. Ugh. Super slow. Its also pretty buggy and half the prints die. Fail. Twitter to the rescue, and @adafruit recommends a USB to Parallel adaptor.

Fast forward two days, and the Sabrent USB to Parallel cable has arrived. Things got busy, but tonight I was able to get out the cable and give it a shot. Parallel may be old, but the cable looks nice and plugging things in are easy. I remember order of operations being important from the ‘old days’, so I tried this combination and it worked. Remember, this is on a standard Ubuntu 9.04 install, YMMV.

1. Plug Parallel end into Zebra
2. Turn on Zebra
3. Plug USB into computer

Okay, now I have it plugged in. A quick ‘dmesg’ in the terminal confirms that it found SOMETHING that looks like a printer. Rock.

[996085.966096] usblp2: USB Bidirectional printer dev 4 if 0 alt 0 proto 2 vid 0x1A86 pid 0×7584

Alright, and now the tricky part: How do I get the computer to talk to it? Actually it was ridiculously easy!

1. Go to System -> Administration -> Printers
2. That brings up the printer management dialog, where you click the New button.
3. It doesn’t find the printer automatically, so go with the Unknown device option and click Forward.
4. It searched for a bit and brought up the Choose Driver screen. Scroll all the way down to Zebra and click Forward.
5. The Zebra LP 2844 uses the EPL2 language, so select EPL2 Label Printer model and the recommended driver.
6. Name it. I called mine ZEBRAR.
7. Print a test page. You know you want to.

Bingo! If everything went okay, you now have a working label printer. Now, what do you do with it?

Well, the easiest way I could figure out how to make things to print on it was to use the GIMP. Here are a few tips:

* The printer is 203dpi. When you create your images, make sure they use this DPI setting (its under advanced settings) Then make the size of the document the size of your stickers in inches. That will make things work great for you.

* Make sure you adjust the page setup! Go to File -> Page Setup. Make sure you select Format for: Zebra as well as your paper (label) size. This will ensure that your prints are exactly what you see.

* For some reason, from GIMP the print copies stuff doesn’t work. Bizarre for sure, but I found a workaround: Use the Print to File option to print a PDF and set the desired number of copies. This will create a PDF with a page for every copy you want. When you print that, it will print out the number of copies you want. Make sure you set the page properties in your PDF viewer before printing!!!

Anyway, thats how you get a Zebra LP 2844 thermal label printer working under linux. Now to get the right kind of stickers and print out hundreds of MakerBot QR code stickers.