mikaelcarlavan

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.

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.

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

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.

I work mostly in PHP, and when I started this project, most of the libraries were very incomplete. Customer needs led me to develop a more complete library and it's only recently that I proposed this library as an API. But, yes, much more complete and easy-to-use packages have appeared since then, although they still focus on events and don't allow to manage tasks or notes.

Thank your for your feedback. I fixed that. Sorry about that.

Yes. Given the feedback so far, I will probably switch to a "pay as you grow" pricing.

Not yet! With the feedbacks I just received, I want to improve the API before posting on PH.

Thank you for your comment. There is indeed the possibility to specify the timezone, but the documentation is obviously not detailed enough on that. I'll clarify that.

Thank you for your comment. Defining the price and associated features was really not easy for me; I hesitated for a long time but you gave me some very good leads!

In fact, not all languages have a library as simple as the Node package you are pointing at. Most libraries require you to use the iCalendar standard syntax which, for a single event, is accessible but becomes complicated for a recurring event for example.

But for the Node package you mentioned, you are absolutely right.

Thank you for your comment, I fixed that.

Thank you for your comment, I fixed that.