Show HN: QR codes where your photo is the code, not pasted on top | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: QR codes where your photo is the code, not pasted on top

sqr.art

Meanwhile https://github.com/heuer/qrcode-artistic has qrcode with animations even.

qrcode-artistic is great, especially the animated ones. It's a different technique though: it composites an image behind a standard QR. Here the picture is encoded into the modules themselves, nothing is pasted on top, which is why it needs the GF(2) solve + decoder validation rather than just high error correction. Complementary tools, really.

$5?

Bit of a rip off honestly

Rip off of what — an existing tool, or the price? Genuinely want to know which so I can actually answer.

5 bucks for a single QR.

Fair. To be clear: the engine is open source (sqrart/qart on Packagist / GitHub) — you can generate these for free and self-host. The €5 pays for the hosted side: a validated render, a destination you can change later without reprinting, and scan stats. If you just want the image once, the library does that for nothing.

Hi HN — solo dev here. sqr.art turns an image into a QR code where the picture is the code: it's encoded into the QR's data and Reed–Solomon bits (the "QArt" approach), rendered as a colour halftone — not a logo pasted on top and hoping error correction survives it. Every code is decoded back by a real reader and URL-verified before it ships, so nothing invalid can go out.

The encoding itself is old (a 2013 SIGGRAPH Asia paper, and there are several open implementations). What actually ate my time was making these things scan off a printed page — a software decoder validates the math, not the print, and the two fail on completely different things. I wrote up the war stories (diamond dots carrying half the ink, flat logos with nothing for a phone's thresholding to grab onto, the ~4 cm print floor): https://sqr.art/blog/the-decoder-lies

The engine is MIT and standalone if you just want the library: https://github.com/mikaelcarlavan/qart-php (composer require sqrart/qart).

You can generate a preview for free without an account — I'd genuinely like feedback on scannability with your own phone and images, especially odd cameras or small prints. Happy to go deep on any of it.

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