[alwa]

I can think of a couple of advantages. For one, punching these holes takes time (and physical space on the object), and a high-redundancy QR code’s extra holes don’t gain you much: instead, this approach situates the redundancy in the physical properties of the object itself.

For two, did you see the encoder/decoder script? Barely two lines of python! Which truly are optional, I guarantee many people here could encode and decode that pattern by eyeball. I know one can hand-calculate a QR code, but why would I when I can use raw bits?