What about the booth?

PhotoBooth-LI started with instructions from Chris Evans at Drummin Hands.  He had A LOT of this figured out before I even dove in.

I modified his design by adding an SD display (1280 x 800) and moving the processing offline from the Raspberry Pi to my cluster of linux servers.

In the current version, the Raspberry Pi Camera takes 4 2592x1944px JPEG pictures and uploads them to a linux server in my datacenter to be converted into a 2X2 montage with the event title at the bottom. The original design posted 500X500px images to tumblr.  I modified the code to take higher resolution pictures and through the magic of several linux scripts automatically post the final JPG to this Wordpress blog.  This way I get to maintain control of all the photos in case the PhotoBooth ends up at a private party in which the customer doesn’t want the photos made public.

Other modifications I have made are:

  • using multi threaded processing to show the user the photos they just took while uploading them to my processing servers
  • using an onboard exim4 MTA to queue the pictures if the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have internet connectivity – deprecated (See next bullet)
  • use python scripts to upload files via https – seems most places don’t like outbound SMTP so I had to rewrite the transmission mechanism for HTTPS for maximum commercial internet usability
  • setting up this blog with Facebook, Google+ and Twitter integration in case people want to post comments or share the photos (this also allowed me to experiment with OAuth)
  • Added a 12V power supply to light up the giant arcade button
  • Added custom sound cues to let the picture takers know when a picture is about the be taken
  • Used a plugin to automatically post pictures to the wordpress blog via POP3 (luckily I already had my own mailserver setup)
  • Used advanced overlays in python to show a visual countdown while also previewing the camera.

PhotoBooth3-LThe shell is a wine box I bought from the local wine store.  I got the handles from Home Depot and most of the extra electronics from AdaFruit.  Behind the scenes is a breadboard, a RaspberryPi, a RaspberryPi Camera, an HD monitor with sound, a power strip, and a 4X4 for mounting and holding up the display.

If any teachers, staff, faculty, friends want to use the photobooth let me know.  If it is a great cause, it might even be free!  Otherwise I think $100 for a few hours might be a good deal.  What do you think? I even come with lighting.

I don’t sell the photo booths, it is just a fun side project I built for education and experimentation.  As you can see, there is still a bit of cleanup that could be done behind the scenes such as hot gluing the LEDs in place instead of the black tape.  I do like the mounting solution of the RaspberryPi which is 4 eye screws with 4 zip ties holding the entire thing suspended in mid air.PhotoBooth5-L

If you want to know more about the booth, I’m happy to chat about it.

–Brett Thorson
Cranial Thunder

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