I purchased the suitcase at a thrift store in Niles, MI a few years ago and it’s just been waiting for a project like this.
I found a few tutorials on similar projects and decided this would be a perfect use for the suitcase.
I was commissioned in April to build the photo booth for an October wedding and overall it took me about 2 months worth of work (most of the being the programming).
The workflow goes like this
- Hit the button
- 4 pictures are taken
- It builds a gif
- Begins printing the photo strip
- Displays the 4 pictures to the user
- Starts over again
There are options that can be turned on to have the photos uploaded to tumblr/twitter, but I found without a super reliable internet connection, this could make the total cycle time over 3 minutes long. In the end, I decided to ditch the upload part and just have the images saved to a thumb drive that can be removed after the event is over.
Why did you spent 2 months? Seems fairly easy? What was the hardest part?