Cryptography with painted cells

I really have no idea what is going on in this puzzle, but what I know is that I'm getting cookies for solving this. I thought you might be interested in trying to solve it. Thanks everyone!

• Welcome to Puzzling! Is this from an ongoing competition? – Deusovi Jan 10 '18 at 20:45
• $2^5 > 26$, so that fits quite well with columns being characters... the empty are likely spaces. Didn't investigate, just a hunch. – Carl Löndahl Jan 10 '18 at 23:22
• thanks! it's not a competition, it's actually just a extra credit thing in my class haha – David David Jan 10 '18 at 23:40
• @David david, are these puzzle typically taught in class? I really envy as there is no such puzzle class (or even club) in my country I guess, haha. – athin Jan 11 '18 at 1:28
• Thanks everyone! And yeah, we were not taught this in class. – David David Jan 16 '18 at 1:56

1 Answer

Well, as Carl Löndahl pointed out, every column could be interpreted as a character. If black is 1 and white is 0, and the most significant digit is the top one, we can translate from binary code to this:
25 1 8 1 8 1 0 25 15 21 0 6 15 21 14 4 0 12 5
Which gives us a slightly weird message if we take " " = 0, "A" = 1, "B" = 2 etc.:
YAHAHA YOU FOUND LE
Maybe "LE" is a mistake and it should be "ME" (L is just one step from M).

• PS: Found with the help of www.dcode.fr (though it isn't really necessary for this simple substitution. – Reinis Mazeiks Jan 11 '18 at 1:07