what is raptorqr fr?

infrost/raptorqr — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

★ 131TypeScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

vibe map

mindmap
  root((RaptorQR))
    What it does
      Sends data as QR video
      Scans QR with camera
      Rebuilds file or text
    Tech stack
      TypeScript
      Rust to WASM
      RaptorQ fountain code
      ZXing scanning
    Use cases
      Offline file transfer
      Privacy focused sharing
      Terminal to browser transfer
    Audience
      Privacy conscious users
      Developers
      Offline workflows

mindmap root((RaptorQR)) What it does Sends data as QR video Scans QR with camera Rebuilds file or text Tech stack TypeScript Rust to WASM RaptorQ fountain code ZXing scanning Use cases Offline file transfer Privacy focused sharing Terminal to browser transfer Audience Privacy conscious users Developers Offline workflows

what do people make with this?

VIBE 1

Send a file from one device to another in the same room with no internet connection or cable.

VIBE 2

Transfer text or small files between an air gapped machine and a normal computer using only a camera and a screen.

VIBE 3

Build a command line workflow that pipes text into a QR stream for another device to scan and read.

what's the stack?

TypeScriptWebAssemblyRustNode.js

how it stacks up fr

	infrost/raptorqr	micheleriva/zbsearch	boob025/peace-equalizer-apo
Stars	131	131	134
Language	TypeScript	TypeScript	TypeScript
Setup difficulty	moderate	easy	easy
Complexity	3/5	3/5	1/5
Audience	developer	developer	general

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

how do i run it?

Difficulty · moderate time til it works · 30min

Needs pnpm and a build step for the WASM packages before the CLI or web app run locally.

in plain english

RaptorQR moves files and text between two devices using animated QR codes instead of a network connection, Bluetooth, or a cable. One device displays a stream of QR codes that change rapidly on screen, and the other device points its camera at the screen to read them and rebuild the original file or text. Everything happens locally in the browser or in a terminal, so nothing is uploaded to any server in between. Under the hood, the project uses a fountain code called RaptorQ, based on an existing Rust implementation compiled to WebAssembly, to break data into packets that can be reconstructed even if some QR frames are missed or misread. It pairs this with a fast QR rendering library and a QR scanning library, both also compiled to WebAssembly, to reach a high transfer speed. The README reports measured examples such as a 95 kilobyte file transferring in well under a second and a 6.5 megabyte file transferring in about 36 seconds, tested using an iPhone camera as the scanner, and states the new pipeline is more than 50 times faster than an earlier JavaScript only version of the same idea. The project is organized as several packages: a core library that handles packaging, scheduling, rendering, and decoding, a command line tool for sending files or piped text from a terminal, and two lower level WASM packages for QR rendering and RaptorQ encoding and decoding on their own. There is also a browser based web app, with a live demo linked in the README, that supports offline use once loaded, since it installs a service worker. To develop it locally you install dependencies with pnpm, then run the web app or the command line tool, or build everything with a single build command. The command line tool can read a file and display it as a looping terminal QR stream, read text piped in from another program, or serve the built web app locally. The README documents a fixed transport header and mentions RaptorQ as the default forward error correction codec, with an older JS based codec kept for compatibility but marked deprecated.

prompts (copy fr)

prompt 1

Help me install and run the RaptorQR CLI so I can send a PDF file to another device using QR codes.

prompt 2

Show me how to set up the RaptorQR web app locally with pnpm and open it for development.

prompt 3

Explain how RaptorQR's RaptorQ fountain code lets it recover a file even if some QR frames are missed.

prompt 4

Walk me through deploying the RaptorQR web app to Vercel using its included configuration.

Frequently asked questions