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shmile is a nodejs-based photobooth.

Shmile in action

Description

With your digital camera, a laptop and a printer, you can have your own DIY low-cost photobooth.

Preparation

Overlay

Create your own custom overlay. Make sure it is a 4x6 crop factor, save it as a 24-bit transparent PNG. See public/images/overlay.png for an example.

It is recommended that this overlay image is 2400x1600px large.

When you are done, save your overlay resource into public/images/overlay.png.

Camera Tips

  • Mount the camera on a steady tripod.
  • It helps to set your camera on manual focus and on its lowest resolution. This reduces shutter lag time.
  • Make sure your flash is charged. If it is not, the camera will wait until the flash charges before firing the shutter, making very awkward, long pauses for your guests to be smiling.

Printer

  • Make sure your printer is set as the system default.

Deploying/running

Server instance

The server is responsible for controlling the camera, and serving the Web interface that users will see.

  1. Go to project root.
  2. npm install to install the node package dependencies.
  3. Install gphoto2. I'm installing with brew. Run brew install gphoto2
  4. Run node app.js to start the server application.

Control interface

This is a Web browser that displays the camera control interface, and shows the visitor the real-time creation of the image. For simple deployments, this can simply be on the same computer that is running the server.

  1. Navigate to localhost:3000 in a A-Grade Web browser (Chrome and Safari latest recommended).
  2. If you want to use an iPad to display this interface, you'll need to have the laptop and iPad connected to the same network. Open Safari on iPad, and type in <computer-name>:3000 to the Address Bar. Tap the Go To button in the Safari bar, and save the app to your home screen (see: http://www.apple.com/iphone/tips/).
  3. On your iPad Home Screen, open the "shmile" app you've just created.

Gallery interface

This is a Web browser instance that displays a view of all the generated images taken so far.

  1. With the server already running on another browser instance, visit http://localhost:3000/gallery (or <server_address>:3000/gallery if you're connecting over a network)
  2. If you're viewing on iPad, open the site in Safari, then save it as a Home Screen app as detailed above. Open the "gallery!" app from your home screen.
  3. You should see a touchable, swipeable list of images that have already been taken. As photos are taken, the new images will be pushed to this Web view in the background.

Note: this is currently buggy and will not work if you don't have any images taken yet. Visit this view when a few photos have been generated.

Notes

  • This was developed for OS X. I cannot help you if you're attempting to run on Windows or Linux distributions.
  • Note that the PTPCamera daemon boots up whenever you plug in your camera. Running a killall PTPCamera will do the trick. Shmile automatically runs this command for you when you boot up.

Credits

License

GPLv2

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/GPL-2.0

MIT

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT