QRCFTP

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  That's only a 16kb file...

Inspiration

To develop an extremely inconvenient (read: unbelievably secure) way to send files between android devices. Learn about android development.

What it does

The app has two actives: send and receive files. The send activity allows you to pick a file that will be encoded into a byte string, which is then chunked and compiled into QR codes. You can press a 'play' button to begin displaying 1 code every 2 seconds. The receive activity scans qr codes using the camera preview, saves them as it sees them, then compiles them into a byte string to be saved on the device.

How we built it

We used Android studio and a library that can generate QR codes.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us have every built anything that runs on android. Android development presents special challenges: managing memory and low cpu power make it difficult to generate and display QR codes quickly. You can only encode like 500 bytes in a QR code, so while we envisioned sending MP3s, this would likely result in thousands of codes to be scanned, and missing or misinterpreting a single one would ruin EVERYTHING.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Highly multi-threaded parsing of files and generation of QR codes. And, it works about as well as you'd think it would.

What we learned

We knew this was not going to work well, but we both learned a lot about android app development, so we're happy.

What's next for QRCFTP

Target the tin-foil-hat wearing demographic. The NSA can't spy on a stream of highly ambiguous visual information.

Built With

• android
• java