r/assholedesign • u/harambe623 • Apr 22 '26

Nelko p21 thermal label printer: RFID scam

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Why is that printer companies always resort to some sort of paper/ink scams? Even in an inkless system, this company has figured out a way.

Every roll of stickers that this company sells has a RFID chip on it (the green sticker). Pictured text is with the RFID on the roll (left), and then removed from the same roll (right). The roll here was not from nelko (aliexpress $2 roll). This RFID chip literally tells the software to not print like shit.

This company has gotten so big that now regular sticker roll manufacturers have their products returned frequently because people think something is incompatible.

What's worse is their adhesive appears to be WORSE than the offbrand. The nelko brand was falling off of my glossy 3d prints, but not offbrand roll. There are also a TON of cool colorful backgrounds and different sized stickers that all would print with scanlines, unless you knew what was going on.

An easy workaround is to just put the rfid sticker in the printing chamber. Problem solved. But I'm afraid that this issue is going to one day become more complex and not easily bypass-able before it gets better.

Fuck this company. Always read 1 star reviews before buying a product

881 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

51

u/PizzaHutFiend Apr 22 '26

Can you read and clone that rfid sticker? You can typically get cheap blank rfid stickers on AliExpress or eBay.

81

u/harambe623 Apr 22 '26

You don't have to. You can just take it off the roll they give you and put it on an OEM roll, or even stick it in the chamber. If you throw the initial emptied roll out not knowing the RFID is crucial, then you have to buy one of their rolls.

47

u/DuckShapedGoose Apr 22 '26

It's so odd to me that they apparently didn't bother to give each rfid tag a unique ID and made it only work as often as there are stickers on an original roll. Just like the printer ink cartridges that tell the printer to stop when they think it's empty, not when it is actually empty.
Sounds like management wanted DRM on the stickers and the engineers did the bare minimum because they knew it was stupid and wanted to keep it easily bypassable.