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Author Topic: Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.  (Read 4426 times)

Arizona Hot

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Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.
« on: November 20, 2011, 12:41 AM »
QR codes are designed to store text or URLs, not pictures. So it was in a spirit of adventure that I tried to get a very small lo-res Cody into a very big QR.  I had to reduce the size of an already-small-to-start-with Cody to get him to fit in a 1,852 character space. I copied that into WordPad, then Notepad, ran that through Touch Up Soft's QRcode v2.10 to get the block below. I was able to recover the file using the same program, but not using either of my other QR decoding programs or Google's ZXing. I was able to view the resulting file using WordPad or Jarte, but not with LibreOffice. I have attached the text file I used if anyone wants to try encoding it with a different program. It will be interesting to see if anyone has an interest in this project. I copied the matrix from here and also saved it and was able to extract and view Cody on my computer from what is here.

Cody.pngShoehorning Cody into a QR code.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2011, 09:45 PM by Arizona Hot »

KynloStephen66515

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Re: Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.
« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2011, 12:49 AM »
Just tried 3 different scanners and it did nothing lol.

Interesting project though :)

hollowlife1987

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Re: Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.
« Reply #2 on: November 20, 2011, 12:56 AM »
Got it to scan on my evo, using barcode Scanner, but it wanted to do a web search wouldn't convert the RTF code into an image  :(

Arizona Hot

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Re: Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.
« Reply #3 on: November 20, 2011, 01:18 AM »
Yes, you have to save the decoded text to a file and then open that in WordPad or Jarte. Copying the text directly into the program doesn't work. If you are having trouble getting the block to decode properly, it may be a camera problem. The camera may have difficulty capturing the code completely(it's a very big, very complex block). You may have to click on the image to expand it(the small image is a thumbnail), and then right-click on that(if you have a Windows browser, I presume non-IE browsers can do this also) and save the picture(or copy it to a picture-manipulation program, save it from there) and then scan that. I don't know if it can be copied directly into the decoding program and scanned successfully. The whole thing is a kludge because QR wasn't set up to do this as I said at the beginning and this project pushes the boundries of QR. Would anyone like to try encoding the text file in some other system to see if that works better. I doubt any other system could encode Cody directly.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2011, 03:26 PM by Arizona Hot, Reason: It was late when I wrote it. »

Arizona Hot

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Re: Shoehorning Cody into a QR code.
« Reply #4 on: November 20, 2011, 09:30 PM »
I tried some things today to get a higher-res image of Cody in the QR matrix. I must have done something different, I was able to get something with almost twice the resolution. This one still is a rich text in a QR and I used the save function to export the decoded text, so I don't know if you can view Cody by copying the decoded text into the viewing program. Let us know if you can extract and view this, I know I can using the same programs as before. The text file is attached below as before, QRcode won't load *.rtf files, so I load rich text in a text file.

Cody2.pngShoehorning Cody into a QR code.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2011, 09:39 PM by Arizona Hot »