@magillus Did you ever solve this? I scanned the Factory Reset and now cannot
get the scanner to work with my code. A factory-fresh ATOM does still work.

But I too think there should be a way to disable QR codes. In particular, since the ATOM is
receiving the scanned QR - it should be up to the application to do what it wants with the scanned
value.

My sample arduino code is at: M5 Atom Testing

UPDATE It seems there is a prohibit scanning of configuration modes, as follows (and defined in their document Commands

uint8_t prohibit_scanning_config_mode_cmd[] = {0x07, 0xC6, 0x04, 0x08, 0x00, 0xEC, 0x00, 0xFE, 0x3B};

thanks,