Launched this week
QR3D Craft
Turn any link into a QR code you can actually 3D print
2 followers
Turn any link into a QR code you can actually 3D print
2 followers
Most 3D printed QR codes fail for one reason: the squares are smaller than the printer can draw. QR3D Craft sizes them for your nozzle and gives you a 3MF with the base and code already split into two colours. Free, no sign-up, runs in your browser.
Launch Team
LoomShow, don't just tell with Loom
Promoted
Hi Product Hunt,
I built this because I kept seeing 3D printed QR codes that nobody could scan, and the reason was never the one people blamed.
A printer lays down a line of plastic about as wide as its nozzle. For a module - one of the little squares - to come out square instead of as a blob, two of those lines have to fit inside it. With a 0.4 mm nozzle that means 0.8 mm per module, and for a normal URL that means a piece of at least 30 mm. Make it smaller and it will not scan, no matter how good your printer is. Most generators will happily hand you a file that cannot work.
So QR3D Craft asks what you are printing with, and sizes the piece around that. You get a 3MF with the base and the code as two separate objects with their colours already assigned, so a multi-material printer prints it straight, and a single-extruder printer only needs one filament change. STL too, if your slicer prefers it.
Three things I care about:
It is free and there is no sign-up.
Nothing is uploaded. The encoder, the geometry and the 3MF writer all run in your browser - if you disconnect after the page loads, it keeps working. The link you type never leaves your machine because there is no server to send it to.
I wrote the encoder from scratch rather than pulling in a library: versions 1 to 40, the four error correction levels, Reed-Solomon, and all eight masks scored so the best one wins. It is on GitHub under MIT, together with an STL writer: github.com/matiehl97-byte/qr3d
There is also a free test kit - six tags with the same code at six different sizes, about 35 g of filament. Print it once and the smallest one that still scans is your printer's limit, which is the only number you need to size any QR piece you ever make.
Where this came from: I am in Chaco, Argentina, and I wrote the whole thing in Spanish first, for the small businesses around me that want a QR on a desk stand and have nobody to ask. The English side - the tool and all thirty-five articles - is the same pages translated by hand, not run through a translator. If you hit a sentence that reads like a machine wrote it, tell me which one and I will fix it.
Happy to answer anything - especially about the geometry, which turned out to be the interesting part.