I'd love to see some more info on this as well. There is a hardware proxy module in 8.0 designed to address this, but I don't know enough about how it works.
I believe we have that model thermal printer in our logistics department for UPS labels (plus a few other very similar models), but the best integration I could come up with was fetching EPL code directly from the UPS API and saving it as an attachment. I shared out the thermal printer and have a simple BAT script as the default program for opening .epl files:
COPY %1 \\<computer_name>\LP2824
It's not a viable solution for POS, but we're at least making it work for shipments.