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TLcube
Open 3D barcodes that fit your design, not fight it
QR encodes data in black-and-white squares — right for a 1994 camera. Cameras changed; the squares didn't. So we spent the slack on looks. TLcube splits a hexagonal cell into three rhombic faces and encodes data in the rank order of their brightness, not in absolute values — shift exposure, gamma or contrast and the answer survives. Four silhouettes, an optional fallback QR, browser generator and scanner. Free to use, like QR. No licence fee, no per-scan cost. Apache-2.0.
Hi Product Hunt 👋
This started as an itch rather than a plan. I kept designing posters and packaging where the last thing to go on was a black-and-white square, and it always felt like an apology. But QR looks the way it does for a reason — it had to be readable by a 1994 camera with almost no compute. Two levels, hard edges, a big finder. Under those constraints, giving up on looks was the rational call.
That constraint is gone. So instead of spending the extra headroom on more density, I spent it on how the thing looks.
TLcube splits a hexagonal cell into three rhombic faces and reads the ORDER of their brightness — 3! = 6 orderings, one base-6 symbol per cell. The nice consequence is that it doesn't care about absolute brightness. I have test frames where the whole code is crushed into a 40-step luminance range out of 255 — barely visible to the eye — and the reference decoder still returns the URL.
The honest trade: it is less dense than QR. The rhombic cell is worse than a square by area. This isn't trying to replace QR; it's trying to earn a seat next to it. Every type can carry a fallback QR in the same print, so there's never a dead end.
Both the generator and the scanner run entirely in the browser, and the stable scanner processes frames on-device. Spec and reference implementation are Apache-2.0 — the format is meant to be free to use.
Still very much in the "improving recognition" phase, and the numbers on the site are the real ones, footnotes and all. Would genuinely like to hear where it breaks for you.
About TLcube on Product Hunt
“Open 3D barcodes that fit your design, not fight it”
TLcube was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 3 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #83 on the daily leaderboard. QR encodes data in black-and-white squares — right for a 1994 camera. Cameras changed; the squares didn't. So we spent the slack on looks. TLcube splits a hexagonal cell into three rhombic faces and encodes data in the rank order of their brightness, not in absolute values — shift exposure, gamma or contrast and the answer survives. Four silhouettes, an optional fallback QR, browser generator and scanner. Free to use, like QR. No licence fee, no per-scan cost. Apache-2.0.
On the analytics side, TLcube competes within Design Tools, Open Source, Developer Tools and GitHub — topics that collectively have 891.6k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how TLcube performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted TLcube?
TLcube was hunted by Estre Soliette. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of TLcube including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Estre Soliette