What are the alternatives with RAW queues being deprecated?

[danfly09]

Before describing my problem I want to give you a little bit of context. I have a network infrastructure with a very limited amount of IPs. In my system we used to work with label printers that received raw ascii data and would just print. Those printers are deprecated and are no longer found. We want to upgrade the printers for newer versions, but the computer from where the data is originated nor the gateway that translates data to raw ascii are running any operating system (pure embedded devices running bare metal firmware), thus, no driver or CUPS service can be installed in such devices.

As a workaround, I have developed some scripts that run in Ubuntu and can take the raw ascii data, transform it into a PS file, and then print it using CUPS. In my laptop the scripts work perfect, however in the Raspberry Pi, it takes forever. To fix this, I configured the raspberry pi just as a bridge (shared raw queue), and I'm planning to install the CUPS service in the server. I tested the changes and also work perfect, now I can use the Raspberry Pi as a gateway with no delay on printing.

The (foreseeable) problem now is that RAW queues are deprecated. I don't want to implement a solution that will live short. So my first question is, even if it's deprecated is it still supposed to work? secondly, what would be the alternatives moving forward that doesn't involve tearing down my network system and rebuild it from scratch?

[Siedlerchr]

I had the same issue and found out about https://www.msweet.org/lprint/ which is basically an IPP everywhere wrapper around the original printer.
Only issue is that I have not found out how to send raw data (zpl) from Windows