Most of us don’t use label stickers very often, so we can afford to spend several minutes fumbling around with corners to try and peel the labels from their backing paper. But if you’re handling many of them a day, like putting “fragile” stickers on shipping boxes, then that inefficient fumbling will be an issue. To make life easier for you, Mr Innovative built this simple machine that quickly dispenses labels.

Mr Innovative designed this machine for the kinds of label stickers that come on rolls of backing paper. It should work with a wide range of roll sizes and the dimensions are easy to modify if you need to accommodate even larger rolls. The best part is that it doesn’t require any configuration. The machine will pull the paper backing around a roller, releasing the sticker. That causes the sticker to cover an infrared sensor and the machine stops. After the user removes that sticker, the machine pulls the paper backing again until the next sticker is ready.

As with most of Mr Innovative’s projects, this utilizes a custom multipurpose control board that hosts an Arduino Nano board. That drives a single stepper motor, which rotates a spool to pull the backing paper from the roll of labels. The machine’s mechanical parts are all either 3D-printable, off-the-shelf hardware and fasteners, or standard 2020 T-slot aluminum extrusion.