Welp, having carved several critter jack-o’-lanterns in 2023 and last year, I thought I’d do something a little different for Halloween this year, so … now that I’m an iNat Ambassador, what if I could carve the QR code for iNaturalist?
Spoiler: it hasn’t worked yet!! Though I haven’t quite given up.
The standard QR code, you will observe, is pretty fiddly, containing dots in a 41×41 grid. I tried anyway, first with a fairly large printout, which didn’t lie anywhere near flat on the smallish prototype pumpkin, and then with a smaller printout (maybe 15 cm square), but after punching a few of the 41 columns of holes that would have been needed, I decided I did not have the patience to continue.
All right, Plan B. I found a free QR code generator that would produce a simpler graphic, 21×21. This code is for inaturalist.ca. I tried marking the square finder patterns in the corners and then preparing to carve by starting to mark the patterns with a sharpie, but again the curvature of the pumpkin was defeating me, I realized. You may observe that the weather is damp.
So a few hours ago I concluded I’d need to get a pretty large pumpkin for the idea to work, only by then, it being October 30, the supermarket had sold out of all pumpkins of any size. A large spaghetti squash seemed like a reasonable alternative, though. I confirmed that a 9 cm × 9 cm printout would reliably be recognized as a QR code when taped to its nearly cylindrical surface, regardless of whether the pattern was as shown or reversed black-for-white. Unfortunately, I suspect that I didn’t align the finder patterns quite well enough for the error correction to work. I wondered if making the finder patterns more prominent by carving them more deeply, as shown in the final image, would help, but the scanning still failed. Incidentally, unless I locked the brightness of the phone camera very low, the image was automatically brightened to the point of obscuring the pattern. Another time, a larger surface would surely make it easier to get good crisp “pixels.” Whether cutting all the way through the squash for the sake of a higher-contrast image would help, I don’t know.
So the eve of All Hallows’ Eve has not been all that I had wished, but hopefully I’ll still have time to come up with something. If any of you can get this idea to work, great!
