Reading QR codes

I wanted to get some testnet bitcoin onto my Android phone (running Andreas Schildbach's wallet app) but struggled to get coin from TP's faucet onto the phone without laboriously typing the address into the faucet's input box. (Ironically, I spent more time trying to avoid typing it in manually than it would have taken to just do that.)

My first strategy was to use libdecodeqr-examples's libdecodeqr-webcam utility. It pretended to work, showing a view of what my laptop's camera sees, and then drawing a green box framing the QR code that it recognized. But despite my attempts to help it see better by placing a converging lens in front of the camera (or the attempt to use another camera which hates being in focus), libdecodeqr-webcam just wasn't displaying the correct bitcoin URI. Sometimes the tool would show a string, and some of it would even look right, but invariably there'd be some corruption.

So I just left it for a few days. I thought the channel between the phone's display and the laptop's webcam output was just too noisy to reliably scan a QR code. Not really what I expected from QR codes (they use an error-correcting code) but hey, who am I to argue with the decoding tool?

It turns out that the tool just isn't up to the task. Even running libdecodeqr-simpletest on a locally-generated image fails, and outputs only a line of control characters. Back to searching, where I found an answer on askubuntu referring to zbar-tools. I had previously overlooked it because the short description made no mention of QR codes, only barcodes.

With zbar-tools installed, I ran zbarcam and it was able to read the QR code from the phone's display immediately - even without the extra lens. Problem solved!