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I used one to build a photobooth for my wedding. The raspberry pi controls a DSLR camera to take 4 photos, stitches them into a 4x6, prints the photo and uploads everything to a Google Photos album which was displayed live on a projector.


I would be insanely interested in a thorough write-up of this. My mother is getting married in a few months and it would be incredible to build for her and her fiance!


I'll try and get the process written down but in the meantime, feel free to shoot me an email with any questions. You can find my email in my profile.


I'm also in the process of building a photobooth. Using the standard Pi Camera module + a Pimoroni Unicorn Hat HD to give people a prompt when the photo is about to be taken. It'll then publish the photos on it's own internal webserver that'll be visible on another Pi for easy emailing / browsing and tweeting! Going to pack it all in an transparent enclosure that looks like the approximate shape of an oversized DSLR.


Nice, that sounds quite a bit more compact than mine. Having really good quality photos for us to keep was the biggest priority so we settled on a DSLR and dedicated flash. Along with the printer, I ended up installing it all into an old speaker cabinet which ended up fitting everything perfectly. I do wish I wasn't living in an apartment at the time and had access to some better tools to build a proper enclosure though.


I've been looking to do this myself, did you follow any guides online to help you with this? How did you connect your camera to the Pi?


I looked at some guides for ideas and was hoping to find a ready to go solution but nothing seemed perfect for our use case. Good quality photos for keepsakes was a primary goal so I used this as an excuse to buy a DSLR (which still ended up being cheaper than renting a photobooth for a few hours would have been). I chose to code it up in Python since it seemed like the best candidate with plenty of libraries that could handle what I wanted. I chose a camera based on what devices were supported in gphoto2. Specifically, I chose a camera that supported live preview which allowed our guests to frame their photo better. I answered the question about connecting the camera in another comment but the tl;dr is that it was connected via USB and all communications were through the python app I wrote using the gphoto2 library.


Very cool. What were you using for your Google Photos uploader on Linux?


The photobooth application was written in Python and I was able to get picasawebsync (https://github.com/leocrawford/picasawebsync) working. Even though the documentation says it's probably no longer working, I can verify that it was working for me as of September 2016 which is after the Picasa deprecation. I had to edit the source a little so that I could call it from my app instead of the command line.

Another challenge was that I couldn't find a good application to display the Google photos album. Nothing I found would display any new photos added to the album after the slideshow had begun while also displaying everything in a continuous loop. I ended up writing a second small Python app also using picasawebsync to periodically sync the photos to a second Raspberry Pi which was hooked up to a projector and display them looped in a random order.


How do you get the pictures transferred to the pi?


The camera is hooked up to the raspberry pi via USB. I'm using the gphoto2 library in python to communicate with the camera, show a live preview on the attached LCD screen, snap photos and copy the photos onto the raspberry pi after they're taken.

Here's a list of cameras that gphoto2 supports: http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

I made sure to buy a DSLR that supported live-preview so that our guests could frame themselves before the photos were taken.


I'm not sure about other brands but I just looked at the bag of Krave jerky I have in front of me and they don't use any corn syrup. Their website [1] confirms it.

[1] https://www.kravejerky.com/about


Does Southwest selectively offer access to different sites? I know Momondo lists Southwest flights when I search through there. Or is Momondo crawling Southwest's site for prices?


Yeah, there was another one [1] built with the same name later. It's a 2/3 scale model of a battleship which is still on display in Point Loma (in San Diego). I used to work around there and it seemed like they were refurbishing it recently.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Recruit_(TDE-1)


I have a pair of Philips Citiscape Uptown headphones (http://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/SHL5905GY_28/uptown-over-ear-...) and they are awesome. Super comfortable and has good noise isolation (but not active noise cancellation).

I've used Sennheiser HD595, Koss TBSE1 (which are basically the Audio Technica ATH-M50), Sennheiser eH-350 and the Philips Citiscape Downtown as my main headphones at some point and the Philips Uptown sound as good as the best of them.

My only gripe with them is the volume slider on the cord isn't great and is staticky when you touch it. As long as you keep it in its highest setting though then it's not a problem. I've used the headphones to take calls on my cell phone and no one has ever complained about audio quality.


I had that same engine you link to as a kid except mine was orange instead of blue. It's definitely one of my more memorable childhood toys and even though a fairly basic representation of an engine, I agree that it was a great intro. On a side note, I remember the screwdriver that kit came with was ridiculously bad. It made stripping the included screws really easy and made putting together the model more of a chore than it should've been.


Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for but you can get some database dumps that you can browse offline at your leisure. I know Wikipedia offers a file you can download so does Stack Exchange.


Have you tried using bumblebee[1]? I use it on my Samsung QX411 which has an NVidia GeForce GT 525M video card along with the onboard Intel. The Intel card is used by default at all times. If you want to run a program using the NVidia card, just prepend 'optirun' to the command.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee


I tried bumblebee it on 12.10, after unsuccessfully trying to install Nvidia drivers. It was...not a good experience. Ended up reinstalling 12.10 just to get Unity and a reasonable resolution back. I have no doubt that there was a fix (possibly involving xorg.conf editing) but I had already spent so much time it and I needed to get work done. Hopefully the new release is better here, but I don't hold much hope.

I'm not blaming bumblebee specifically here, it's just a pervasive side effect of Linux and the modular approach. I can really appreciate the integration that goes in to a Mac.


I'm sure experiences vary greatly depending on the mix of hardware. I remember having to tweak some things to get bumblebee to work properly (or maybe I had to recompile from the source) but it's worked flawlessly since. This is on Ubuntu 12.04.

pkolaczk does bring up a good issue about the DisplayPort not working properly though. I don't use an external display on my laptop and have never played with that.

On another note, I remember installing 12.10 on my desktop right around the time it came out. My desktop has a Radeon HD3870 video card which was completely incompatible with Unity. I don't remember the issue exactly but my choice was either to use the open source drivers or have the desktop environment fail to show at all with ATI's drivers. I just did a search and I guess the fix is to downgrade X-Server and install a legacy driver. It's a shame something as central to the user experience as GUI performance still doesn't work out of the box or worse yet, critically breaks on an upgrade.


For me bumblebee works, but then the DisplayPort is useless. It would be awesome if bumblebee could automatically detect that the laptop is docked and turned on the external graphics to enable proper functioning of DisplayPort. Or even not automatically, but simpler than uninstalling/installing bumblebee (and fixing the mess it did to config files everytime).


A prepaid phone specifically purchased to be used briefly and then replaced is known colloquially as a burner phone or burner.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepaid_mobile_phone

So basically a phone that can't be tracked to you and you can get rid of and replace easily.


Here's a clip of that joke: http://youtu.be/u6xaj2fC1jI?t=2m38s


You guys nailed it - Mitch's joke was indeed what I was thinking of when I wrote the comment.


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