15.1.15. Tag and barcode generators¶

A camera that detects AprilTags needs printed AprilTags to point at, so the IDE generates them. Tools → Machine Vision → AprilTag Generator lists the six tag families the camera can detect, with the family’s size in parentheses:

TAG16H5 – 30 tags.
TAG25H7 – 242 tags.
TAG25H9 – 35 tags.
TAG36H10 – 2,320 tags.
TAG36H11 – 587 tags. The recommended family: the best balance of count, detection robustness, and false-positive resistance, and the default in the camera’s examples.
ARKTOOLKIT (the ARTOOLKIT family) – 512 tags.

A family is a fixed alphabet of tag patterns designed together so its members are hard to confuse with each other; every tag in a family encodes one ID number, and the detector reports which family member it saw. Pick one family for a project and generate only the IDs the project needs – detection is configured per family, and fewer valid IDs means fewer false positives.

Choosing a family opens a dialog asking for the range of tag IDs to generate and whether to print the family name and ID under each tag (on by default, and worth keeping – a floor scattered with anonymous tags is unidentifiable). The generator then writes one printable image per tag into a chosen folder – a US-Letter page with the label on, a square image without it. Print them at whatever physical size the application’s detection distance requires, on matte paper if glare is a concern.

For the other symbologies the camera reads – QR codes, Data Matrix codes, and linear barcodes – the Machine Vision menu’s generator entries open a web search for online generators rather than generating locally, since free generators for those formats are ubiquitous.