Guy Dupont Fights Back Against Restaurant QR Codes with the A LA QRTE ChatGPT-Powered Menu Printer
Feeding screenshots of online menus to ChatGPT and printing them on demand turns the tables on the restaurant QR code movement.
Maker Guy Dupont is sick of the modern trend of replacing paper menus in restaurants with QR codes which need to be scanned on a smartphone, and is fighting back with the A LA QRTE — a portable gadget that turns QR codes into rapidly-printed menus on demand.
"The A LA QRTE [is] a portable QR code scanner/printer that turns pesky QR-based restaurant menus into physical, paper copies… right at your table," Dupont explains of the device, housed — appropriately enough — in a metal lunchbox with handle for ease of transportation. "[It was] ultimately a very simple build."
Maker Guy Dupont is sick of the modern trend of replacing paper menus in restaurants with QR codes which need to be scanned on a smartphone, and is fighting back with the A LA QRTE — a portable gadget that turns QR codes into rapidly-printed menus on demand. The ability to modify prices on demand, hide unavailable items, and avoid damage to printed menus has made the practice commonplace now — but the A LA QRTE flips table.
Based on a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 microcontroller, a Treedix MAX3232 breakout, and a Useful Sensors Tiny Code Reader, the CircuitPython-powered device scans a restaurant's QR code and obtains a link to the online menu. This link is then passed to a back-end web app, running on a remote and more powerful server, which accesses the URL, captures a screenshot, extracts the text, and converts it to a printable format before sending that back to the A LA QRTE for printing on a Maikrt 58mm thermal printer.
The conversion process is worth a deeper look. Rather than trying to do everything manually, Dupont opted to farm some of the work off on OpenAI's popular-though-divisive ChatGPT large language model (LLM). "We ask 'would you kindly summarize and reformat this menu for me,'" Dupoint explains. "This works way better than it has any right to."
Dupont's full project video is reproduced above, with hardware details on Hackaday.io and the software published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license. Dupont does have a warning for anyone thinking of building their own, though: "I was asked to leave two different restaurants trying to test this," he admits.
