Comment by kamranjon
A friend and I were talking about a somewhat related idea.
We were wondering if we could encode the STL for a 3d print entirely into a QR code and then put that on the actual printed object - so that any piece you made could be replicated by just scanning the object and printing again.
When looking into it I thought it just was too much data, even looked into multi-colored QR codes. But I didn’t realize you could just make a bigger QR code…
Did this a while ago for a table as a design exploration. We encoded a 2D file (because the table only required cutting sheet materials) and still had to use a custom compression algorithm for the proof of concept. https://johnkestner.com/rev/