12 August 2008

QR codes for cogteeth.com

With a little help from the Google Chart API, I've added the ability to create QR code t-shirt, mugs and cards over at cogteeth.com.

QR codes are quite nifty little two-dimensional barcodes which can store a surpising amount of data in a small space. There are numerous readers available to decode them including mobile phone apps which enable you to decode them using your phone camera.

Any data can be stored in these codes but there are a number of standards or conventions recognised by the readers. For example, many will detect an encoded URL and automatically pull up the referenced web page. The documentation for the zxing reader gives a good summary of these conventions.


Dean Collins said...

You might want to check out http://www.cognation.net/qr/google_api.html for some documentation on the api function.

The google documentation is a little lacking.


maport said...

dean: Yes Google don't provide documentation on the uses of the QR chart in the chart API docs. But that's the right thing to do: the chart itself just encodes the raw data provided by the chl parameter. It's the QR readers that define what to do with the data extracted from a QR code.

As mentioned in the post, Google's own QR Code reader library, Zebra Crossing (ZXing) does provide documentation on the data formats it (and presumably many other readers) support.

Omar Abid said...

yet I have an auto encoder http://omarabid.com/barcode/online_qrcode.php