Maker Man Dupont is sick of the fashionable pattern of changing paper menus in eating places with QR codes which should be scanned on a smartphone, and is preventing again with the A LA QRTE — a conveyable gadget that turns QR codes into rapidly-printed menus on demand.

“The A LA QRTE [is] a conveyable QR code scanner/printer that turns pesky QR-based restaurant menus into bodily, paper copies… proper at your desk,” Dupont explains of the system, housed — appropriately sufficient — in a steel lunchbox with deal with for ease of transportation. “[It was] in the end a quite simple construct.”

Maker Man Dupont is sick of the fashionable pattern of changing paper menus in eating places with QR codes which should be scanned on a smartphone, and is preventing again with the A LA QRTE — a conveyable gadget that turns QR codes into rapidly-printed menus on demand. The power to change costs on demand, disguise unavailable gadgets, and keep away from harm to printed menus has made the apply commonplace now — however the A LA QRTE flips desk.

Primarily based on a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 microcontroller, a Treedix MAX3232 breakout, and a Helpful Sensors Tiny Code Reader, the CircuitPython-powered system scans a restaurant’s QR code and obtains a hyperlink to the net menu. This hyperlink is then handed to a back-end net app, working on a distant and extra highly effective server, which accesses the URL, captures a screenshot, extracts the textual content, and converts it to a printable format earlier than sending that again to the A LA QRTE for printing on a Maikrt 58mm thermal printer.

The conversion course of is price a deeper look. Reasonably than attempting to do every part manually, Dupont opted to farm a few of the work off on OpenAI’s popular-though-divisive ChatGPT massive language mannequin (LLM). “We ask ‘would you kindly summarize and reformat this menu for me,'” Dupoint explains. “This works method higher than it has any proper to.”

Dupont’s full venture video is reproduced above, with {hardware} particulars on Hackaday.io and the software program printed to GitHub underneath the permissive MIT license. Dupont does have a warning for anybody pondering of constructing their very own, although: “I used to be requested to depart two completely different eating places attempting to check this,” he admits.