A QR-code poster for all you guerrilla marketing types

Jonas Butz, a high school student from Germany, was on Twitter the other day, and showed us a rather excellent QR code poster pointing at this website which he’d made after a hard day’s designing Lego cases. We retweeted it, and it turned out to be extremely popular, so I’ve asked his permission to post it here so those of you who don’t do the Twitter thing can see it and download it.

Raspberry Pi QR code

Jonas has made the QR code available as a .png file, so you can download it by right-clicking on the image, enlarge it to whatever size you fancy, print it out and stick it all over your school or place of work to entice people to visit our website. Spread the word – and thank you, Jonas!

(Edit: the original QR code was occasionally not being recognised by people using Barcode Scanner on Android devices – we’d had some reports of it working most, but not all of the time. Jonas has also made this version, with a slightly smaller raspberry in the middle of it, which Barcode Scanner seems to be much happier with.)

70 comments

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I’m taking every (good) Raspberry Pi QR code poster and putting one of each around my school.

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So how are you supposed to scan it with that raspberry in the way?
I read it as [edit – snip – turns out image was accidentally flipped]

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I’ll put it up with this and a unobstructed QR code as well.

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Cancel everything- it worked. HUH???

liz

Have you actually tried it, or are you just complaining without bothering to test? It does work; we’ve had it tested on pretty much every platform going (thanks to an army of phone-wielding teenagers on Twitter), and the raspberry doesn’t break the code.

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I did test it, just incorrectly (I flipped the image accidentally). I didn’t know about correcting. Sorry everyone, Extremely so.

liz

No probs – nifty, though, isn’t it? (Not to mention strangely cute.)

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yep! I’m going to put it up at my middle school if I can.

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If you could edit my comments, and insert a strikethrough through them all please?

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Well, the incorrect ones?

liz

I wouldn’t normally, but since you ask so nicely… ;)

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As an engineer who has worked with error correction, I find this kind of thing rather annoying. Engineers work out how to put error correction in, so that it works even if there’s a smudge, or some damage or glare. And then some marketing type discovers that, hey, a perfect code will still read if they insert a graphic in it! But you’ve used up that error correction budget by doing this, so it probably won’t read now if there’s a smudge or glare. I’m not talking about *you* of course, because Rpi is so cool you get a pass. :-)

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There is enough redundancy in the code that it should be scannable regardless of the berry in the middle. Just tried it with Barcode Scanner for Android.

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… unless the redundancy is/was actually needed due to blurry printing, bad camera resolution, etc.

Sure, the QR looks nice, but it needs to be understood that is on the expense of reliability. I think it’s an abomination of the intent of error recovery.

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Note that QR codes allow you to choose the level of error recovery, so if you want to put a logo in the middle you can crank up the error recovery settings to get the overall reliability back where you want it.

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Works as an excellent Facebook profile pic!

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Or Gravatar :-)

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Funny and… It works! :-)

Hoping to get one from the first batch…

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The QR code is great! Shame the rpi.org site looks so crap on iPhone though… It’s only about half as wide as the screen, at least on my iPhone 4 w/ iOS 5.0.1.

liz

You should give it another go – we’ve just made some changes to it this evening.

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Oh, sweet! Thank you :D I’ve been using the Atomic Web Browser to view this site with decreased font size, but now I can use Safari :)

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Just tested on my iPhone and it works great! :)

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Now if I only could get that as SVG, my cousin could create stickers in his vinyl cutter :-)

liz
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I made a SVG Version for you:
http://skysimulation.de/marius/raspi_qrcode.svg
Have fun distributing it :-)

liz

Thanks Marius – and thanks for the pdfs too!

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The converter de-colors it to monochrome which makes the buckyball of the raspberry invisible and a blob.. Here’s a link to a .svg with the raspberry re-colored.
http://s000.tinyupload.com/download.php?file_id=00981864354572765645&t=0098186435457276564528349

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Oh, someone posted faster. Never mind then!

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I made two lossless vector versions as PDF, one with only one QR Code on a DIN A4 Page, and one with six:
http://skysimulation.de/marius/raspi_mid1.pdf
http://skysimulation.de/marius/raspi_mid6.pdf

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The codes are linking to http://http://www.raspberrypi.org instead of http://www.raspberrypi.org – i noticed that after printing some :(

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Scanning QR-Code for the first time with the iphone and NeoReader :)

Very funny redirecting me to http://www.raspberrypi.org
:)

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these should be on stickers in the shop. :-)

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Agreed

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Agreed. All in favor?

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Aye!

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Aye!

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I was just going to suggest the same! :)

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QR code? Useful indeed. But is practical image recognition only limited to next gen bar codes? What about a mobile app that recognises *logos*? No doubt already done to death on the App Store. If not, I claim copyright (c) and patent here and now!

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Layar has a feature they call “layar vision” that does exactly that. You can train the images yourself so you could put a link on a certain building sign or cereal package if you wanted.

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Google Goggles (try saying that 10 times fast).

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Funny and works very well with an iPhone :)

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Great advertising barcodes Liz! :-)
Sorry to hear your are allergic to Lobsters.
Let us hope this artwork reaches Rpi . . .

Here are Puppy + RPi initial artwork . . .
http://bit.ly/yIqZh2

Puppy Linux loads into and runs from memory
faster than other Linux
which typically have to swap programs
in and out of small amounts of memory

Puppy was originally designed to run from SD media
We are still optimised for running in 256MB of Ram

Applications for browsing, writing, spreadsheets
personal messaging, free Internet phone, graphics etc
are included in Puppy
A configured Puppy can be esily remastered
with a few mouse clicks

We offer a radical and unique solution for RPi
When our developers get their Raspberries
Puppy ARM will follow shortly and develop rapidly

Puppy on ARM
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PARM

for details and download
puppylinux.com

to learn about Puppy
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppySchool

for support
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php

Puppy is organized as a DoOcracy
http://www.communitywiki.org/en/DoOcracy

Expect more in less
. . . and now back to the records . . . :-)

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Having used Puppy on a large number of low-end machines already, I’d already decided that it would be my distro of choice for at least some of the many Raspis I intend to buy eventually. An excellent compact ultra-stable distro with a large enough userbase/community to be able to provide many more useful developments.

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Stop that right now! You can all go posting these up AFTER I order my RasPi!

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I was thinking the same thing lol and I also agree with the sticker idea

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How about putting it on some T shirts and passing them out to teachers…

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good idea but im not sure whether the teachers would ACTUALLY wear them…

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I have taken the image, and “tweaked” it a little… adding some “raspberry” points…

http://imm.io/hlqV

Thoughts?

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Work with mobiletag

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[…] fancy, print it out and stick it all over your school or place of work to entice people to …Via http://www.raspberrypi.org Share […]

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I think these are seriously cool or is that just because I am a nerd? Will put one in my car window (Hope it doesn’t cause a crash) and on the notice board at work.

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Hello,Raspberry Pi

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Awsome, :L

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Wow, that QR code works very well. Its the “fastest” code ever scanned with the FOSS App “Barcode Scanner”.

It needs less than a second for get the message behind it.

I think it works very good.

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Nice!

And it would be even nicer with a 1-2 pixel white border around the logo.

I’m as far away as you can get from being an artist, but I pulled the png into Gimp and just freehanded a white pixel around the raspberry. As crude as I did, it looked pretty darn good, and my android Barcode Scanner read it faster as well.

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Do some stickers of this code :) it would be great to tag my surroundings and campus.

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You mean like this? :P http://saschaheylik.com/images/RPiQRCode.png

Liz, feel free to use it however you want.

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Hackaday had a good writeup on how to make your own graphical QR code.
http://hackaday.com/2011/08/11/how-to-put-your-logo-in-a-qr-code/

Also a white border separating the logo from the code will improve readability

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It is also possible and much easier with QRhacker.com.

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Cool thingy. I made this the profile picture of my website on Google+. :)

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It’s great that others are looking to adjust the original QR image with a Raspberry but I think the original is still the best. I also agree this would be great as a sticker.

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Nice QR-Code. I printed a lot and will stick them everywhere at my hometown. First I tetsted it with the Iphone 4s. Perfect.

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Sorry to say that, but the QR code PNG suffers from a beginner’s mistake – forgetting the quiet zone. It is part of the code and should therefore be in the PNG as well.
If you have a recent version of Firefox, it’s quite easy to see: right-click the image, “View Image”, and then try to make your device recognize the code. The gray background will make this impossible in most barcode readers.

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Thanks, I was wondering why I couldn’t get it to recognize at all when I opened the larger image.

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My Windows Phone (Mango) fails to recognise it too ;o(

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Oh, see the comment above the “quiet zone”. It works from the blog post, just not the full PNG (seemingly due to the lack of a border around it)

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I recently used the Raspberry Pi QR code for a demo when giving a talk on 1D and 2D barcodes. I put a bit of post-it(tm) on the code and showed that with its robust error correction it could still be scanned. The audience (some old IEEE folks) were suitably impressed. Thanks for the QR code and the very cool logo.

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