About QRnegie

QRnegie makes QR codes with a little Carnegie Mellon in them, for a course page, a campus event, a club poster or anywhere a printed image should take someone to a link.

Where the Styles Come From

The Scotty in Scotty (Mosaic) is traced from the avatar of the Scotty chatbot. Scotty (Simple) uses the portrait of Scotty in his red scarf from University Communications & Marketing's Scotty illustrations.

Kraus Campo is named for the garden on the roof of the Posner Center, by artist Mel Bochner and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. Its numbered tiles and orange paths suggested a code made of numbers, set in the garden's orange. Explore CMU public art.

Campus lore says Wean Hall looks like a turtle eating a Cheeto. The turtle is the building itself, with its concrete “head” over the entrance. The Cheeto is The Love of Two Oranges, Clark Winter's orange steel sculpture, which stood outside Wean Hall for decades. Read the sculpture's story.

Binary Heart puts the CMU heart, traced from the university's own image, among ones and zeros. Tilted Square turns the code inside a red square outline, after the tilted square that appears with Carnegie Mellon's wordmark. Basic Black is a plain code, black on white.

How It Works

QRnegie draws the code's data modules in the style you pick and leaves the patterns a scanner looks for, such as the three corner squares, plain and intact.

• It encodes your text and nothing else. It never visits the destination or adds a redirect or tracking.
• Nothing is saved. Each image is drawn when it's requested, and a downloaded code doesn't depend on QRnegie.
• The same address always gives the same image, so a code on a page doesn't change.

Technical Details

QRnegie encodes text with node-qrcode and draws each style as SVG; sharp turns it into a PNG. In every style but Tilted Square, each module gets a whole number of pixels, so edges stay crisp. Kraus Campo's numerals are outlines from Open Sans ExtraBold, under the SIL Open Font License. Its tests decode the finished image of every style with jsQR, a separate reader.

QRnegie is a small TypeScript app built with Express and sharp, with an MCP server for AI agents.

Contributing to QRnegie

The GitHub repository has the code, its tests and documentation. To report a problem or suggest a change, open an issue or send a pull request.