So this past weekend was my daughter's 5th birthday party, the reason for this project.

The photo booth was a big hit, but did have a few snags. First, the printer wasn't printing anything, so I tweaked the code ( I commented out the wait 2 minutes after the file is sent to the printer before you can take another picture. This keeps the printer from being overwhelmed.) That didn't fix the problem- but a reboot did. I didn't have time to re-enable the wait time, which led to another problem- kids kept hitting the buttons right away to take another picture. The photos were captured just fine, but not every picture made it out of the printer successfully.

The front of the photo booth, seen below mounted to a re-purposed lemonade stand from a prior birthday, is just a plywood board wrapped in fabric. You can see the two lights in mason jars up top, triggered by a relay when photos are taken. The screen in the middle is just a 19" TV. There are three arcade buttons on the bottom left for choosing photos. There is a hole in the center of the board for the camera.

I need to take a better picture of the back of the board, so I'll upload that in my next post.

My plans for improvements are:

• Add an audio cue when a picture has been taken (buzzer or audio file)
• Make a better 'ready light' for when you can take a picture
• improve printing - I think lowering the printed resolution might improve the transmission speed to the printer
• Power switch- right now on/off is handled by plugging/ unplugging from mains
• Upload pictures to the web
• GUI (using pygame?)