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photobooth

A Raspberry-Pi powered photobooth using gPhoto 2.

Spork notice

This was intended to be a temporary fork from br's original photobooth. However, he/she has not yet responded to my pull requests to fold my additions back into the original project. You'll find br's original README appended below my notes. --b9

Major differences

  • Allow portrait photos (just like a real photobooth!) by putting camera and monitor on their side. You can either edit the photobooth.py file and change display_rotate and camera_rotate, or just hit the 'r' key at run time toggle rotation.
  • Automatically prints to default printer if python-cups is installed.
    • The idea is that you'll set up the default queue to be a photo printer set to 4x6 (or whatever paper size you use).
    • Automatic printing can be disabled by default in the program by setting auto_print=False at the top of photobooth.py.
    • Automatic printing can be toggled at run time by hitting the 'p' key.
    • An individual print can be cancelled during a 10 second countdown. If the button is pressed (or actually any event happens) during that time, printing will be cancelled.
  • Much improved display handling. Now defaults to native resolution instead of being hardcoded to 1824x984. (You can still force a resolution by setting display_size in photobooth.py).
  • Uses /dev/shm (if available) to store preview files instead of writing to /tmp. SD Cards, like on the Raspberry Pi, have a limited number of writes and so it doesn't make sense to be writing 30 JPEGs per second while people are posing.
  • Helper script (utils/jbp.sh) for Raspian (or Debian Jessie) to install a working version of gphoto2. The photobooth program requires gphoto2 >= 2.5.6, but it's not in the standard repositories. The original author suggested downloading and compiling it from source, which works but takes a very long time on a Pi. Much simpler and faster is to add the "jessie backports" repository and install a newer gphoto from there. The jbp.sh script takes care of doing all of that for you.
  • Framerate greatly improved during preview. The original code was so slow (at least with the webcams I was using) that posing for pictures was difficult. (Biggest improvements from blitting an array instead of a Pygame Surface, blitting to a subsurface of the display, and from caching the countdown rendered text.)
  • If you're curious about your frame rate, you can press '1' to test the original blitting (but with the improved text cache), or '2' which adds the improved array blitting, or '3' which adds subsurface blitting. After 5 seconds, the screen will show your FPS.

Implementation notes

In theory, reality and theory are the same. In reality, they are not. Here are some notes on things I did to make this photobooth work nicely on the particular hardware I have. (Raspberry Pi 3B, HP w2207h rotatable HDMI monitor with builtin speakers, Logitech QuickCam)

  • First problem: Setting up the photo printer required an ugly kludge. The first printer I tested (Canon Pixma MP) actually worked great once I set a few default options to the CUPS queue:

    • Media size: 4x6
    • Color Precision: Best
    • Media Type: Glossy Photo Paper
    • Shrink page if necessary: Shrink (print the whole page)
    • Borderless: Yes
    • Error Policy: abort-job

    I could just send any JPEG over and the Gutenprint driver would automatically rotate, scale, and center it for me. Nice!

    However, the next printer I tried, an HP Officejet 7300, did not have a nice Gutenprint driver. Instead, I had to use hpcups (apt-get install printer-driver-hpcups), which apparently does not rotate, shrink, or center images.

  • Printing solution: I made a hack that simply calls ImageMagick's convert before printing to rotate and force the media size to be 4x6:

    convert filename.jpg -rotate -90 -page 4x6 filename.pdf

    This works because the print driver apparently obeys the page size specified in PNG and PDF files and scales appropriately.

    • DIGRESSION: the proper solution would perhaps have been to change the photobooth.py software to handle all rotate, scale, and centering on its own. However, that would require photobooth.py knowing the media size, which turns out to be rather ugly. It is possible to query CUPS for the current media size, but it returns strings which are driver dependent. For example, for Gutenprint I would specify "4x6", but for hpcups, I need to specify "Photo4x6.FB" (I believe "FB" stands for "full bleed" which means "don't add borders").

  • Second problem: no camera. I had intended to use my nifty Canon PowerShot for capturing the photos. I had not known that Canon stopped allowing any API remote control of the PowerShot line and so it would not work. (Shoulda kept my old PowerShot!)

  • Here is a (partial) list of gphoto2 compatible cameras which can do "remote capture" (snap a photo under computer control).

  • Solution: I ransacked my junk draw and came up with an old USB webcam (Logitech QuickCam, VGA). It worked once I switched photobooth.py to use OpenCV instead of Gphoto. (Thank you original author, BR, who thoughtfully added in that option!) However, it was limited to VGA resolution (640x480) and the kernel driver (gspca) seems a bit glitchy. (Occasional graphical artifacts, sometimes camera needs to be unplugged and replugged in. It may not be a driver problem: perhaps my power supply can't supply enough current?)

  • Next problem: postage stamp sized previews during the "POSE" time. As noted above, for speed I had changed the photobooth to blit a raw array (not a Surface) to the pygame display. One cannot easily scale up raw arrays (Pygame transformations only work on Surfaces), so my code works great if the camera is a higher resolution than the display (which is what you'd normally expect). However, my lousy resolution QuickCam gave me a tiny island of a preview, adrift in a sea of black, wasted pixels.

    On a normal computer, it is possible to force the screen resolution to be lower by setting display_size = (640, 480) in photobooth.py. However, that does not work for my situation as the Raspberry Pi 3B is not able to dynamically switch the HDMI resolution.

  • Solution: edit /boot/config.txt and force the HDMI mode to a lower resolution. I set mine to 640x480 like so:

    hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=4

    I found which mode number was 640x480 by typing tvservice -m DMT .

  • To play a nice shutter sound when taking pictures, I enabled HDMI audio by editing /boot/config.txt and uncommenting hdmi_drive=2.

  • DIGRESSION: the Raspberry Pi can configure an HDMI monitor in one of two ways:

    • Group 1: CEA (Consumer Electronics Association), which is intended for televisions. CEA has the benefit of automatically using speakers builtin to the display. It has the downside of using "overscan" (a black border around the image) by default and not being able to show a "true" black. (Darkest color is 16, not 0).

    • Group 2: DMT (Display Monitor Timing), which is intended for computer monitors. DMT modes are always progressive, never interlaced. DMT doesn't have CEA's overscan annoyances and will actually use the darkest black available on your monitor. The downside is that DMT modes default to using the DVI "drive" which cannot send audio to speakers over HDMI.

      You can force a Raspberry Pi to find your monitor's speakers either permanently or temporarily:

      *** Permanently: uncomment or add hdmi_drive=2 in /boot/config.txt and reboot.

      *** Temporarily: Use the tvservice -e ... HDMI command and then switch virtual terminals to refresh the screen. Unfortunately, tvservice doesn't let you change just the DRIVE, you have to change the GROUP and MODE simultaneously, so you'll need to run tvservice -s first to find out what GROUP and MODE you are using. (Note that tvservice -s shows the DRIVE at the beginning, but tvservice -e requires the DRIVE to be specified at the end.)

      $ tvservice -s
state 0x12000a [DVI DMT (58) RGB full 16:10], 1680x1050 @ 60.00Hz, progressive

$ tvservice -e "DMT 58 HDMI"
$ # Now press Ctrl-Alt-F1 then Ctrl-Alt-F7

  • Sound latency

    If you have trouble with the shutter and beep sounds seeming to come half a second too late, try running 'pulseaudio --kill' at the command line and try running photobooth again. That fixes it for me.

GPIO pins

The photobooth uses two GPIO pins for switches and one for an LED lamp.

  • GPIO 24 (pin 18): button to shutdown photobooth
  • GPIO 23 (pin 16): button to take pictures
  • GPIO 4 (pin 7): +3.3V for blinking LED (use a resistor)

They can hooked up to any convenient GND, but some handy ones are shown in the diagram below.

/---------------------------\
| 01          02            |
| 03          04            |
| 05          06            |
| 07 LED+     08            |
| 09 Gnd      10            |
| 11          12            |
| 13          14 Gnd        |
| 15          16 SNAP PHOTO |
| 17          18 SHUTDOWN   |
| 19          20 Gnd        |
| 21          22            |
| 23          24            |
| 25          26            |
| 27          28            |
| 29          30            |
| 31          32            |
| 33          34            |
| 35          36            |
| 37          38            |
| 39          40            |
\---------------------------/

Sounds provenance

The sound files "shutter.wav", "bip1.wav", and "bip2.wav" are from Freesound.org. Bip1 and 2 were created by Xinaesthete and are under a Creative Commons Attribution License. You can download the original files from:

  https://www.freesound.org/people/xinaesthete/sounds/26953/
  https://www.freesound.org/people/xinaesthete/sounds/26954/

Happy Ending

Two love-struck teens who met at a party where hackerb9's Photobooth was installed were orbiting around each other the entire night, both too shy to swap contact info. Until the very end, that is. The guy took a photobooth print that had them looking especially cute, cut it, saved two photos for himself, scribbled his number on the other two, and passed it to the girl as they parted ways. I don't know if they ever dated, but I suspect so given how pleased she was with the gesture.

I've appended below, nearly unchanged, br's original README file.

Description

Python application to build your own photobooth using a Raspberry Pi, gPhoto2 and pygame.

The code was developed from scratch but inspired by the following tutorials/projects:

Requirements

Software stack

TLDR: sudo apt-get install python-pygame gphoto2 python-opencv python-cups

The following is required for running this photobooth application. I used the versions given in brackets, others might work just as well.

RPi.GPIO is necessary to use external buttons as a trigger but it works just fine without. Triggering is then only possible using touch screen / mouse or key 'c'.

Hardware

  • Raspberry Pi (Any device able to run the software stack should work fine)
  • Camera supported by gPhoto. I've used a Canon EOS 500D.
  • Optional: External button that closes GPIO23 (pin 16) and GND.

Usage

Simply download photobooth.py or clone the repository and run it. It opens the GUI, prints the features of the connected camera, e.g.,

$ ./photobooth.py
Abilities for camera             : Canon EOS 500D
Serial port support              : no
USB support                      : yes
Capture choices                  :
                                 : Image
                                 : Preview
Configuration support            : yes
Delete selected files on camera  : yes
Delete all files on camera       : no
File preview (thumbnail) support : yes
File upload support              : yes

and waits for you to hit the button to take pictures.

Available actions:

  • Press q: Exit the application
  • Press c: Take four pictures, arrange them in a grid and display them for some seconds.
  • Hit a switch that closes GPIO23 (Pin 16) and GND: Take four pictures, arrange them in a grid and display them for some seconds.
  • Click anywhere on the screen: Take four pictures, arrange them in a grid and display them for some seconds.

All pictures taken are stored in a subfolder of the current working directory, named YYYY-mm-dd after the current date. Existing files are not overwritten.

Installation

A brief description on how to set-up a Raspberry Pi to use this photobooth software.

  1. Download latest Raspbian image and set-up an SD-card. You can follow these instruction.

    If your display needs some additional configuration, change the file config.txt in the boot-partition to your needs. For example, I'm using a Pollin LS-7T touchscreen, for which I need to enter the following to avoid overscan:

    hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=87
hdmi_cvt=1024 600 60 6 0 0 0

  2. Insert the SD-card into your Raspberry Pi and fire it up. Use the raspi-config tool that is shown automatically on the first boot to configure your system (e.g., expand partition, change hostname, password, enable SSH, configure to boot into GUI, etc.).

  3. Reboot and open a terminal. Type sudo rpi-update to install the latest software versions. Reboot.

  4. Run sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade to upgrade all installed software.

  5. Install any additionally required software:

  • Pillow:

    sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip libjpeg8-dev
sudo pip install Pillow

  • gPhoto2: Unfortunately, the version in the repositories is too old to work (some USB-bugs), hence one must use Gonzalos installer script

    git clone https://github.com/gonzalo/gphoto2-updater
sudo gphoto2-updater/gphoto2-updater.sh

    To ensure the camera can be controlled properly via USB, remove some files:

    sudo rm /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.gtk.Private.GPhoto2VolumeMonitor.service
sudo rm /usr/share/gvfs/mounts/gphoto2.mount
sudo rm /usr/share/gvfs/remote-volume-monitors/gphoto2.monitor
sudo rm /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor

  • xinput_calibrator to calibrate touchscreens:

    wget http://adafruit-download.s3.amazonaws.com/xinput-calibrator_0.7.5-1_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i -B xinput-calibrator_0.7.5-1_armhf.deb

    Calibrate by calling xinput_calibrator and pasting the shown snippet to a new file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf (Create the directory if necessary).

  1. Reboot.

  2. Clone the Photobooth repository

    git clone https://github.com/reuterbal/photobooth

    and run photobooth.py

  3. Optional but highly recommended, as it improves performance significantly: install some Python bindings for gPhoto2. For that, either Piggyphoto or gphoto2-cffi can be used. At the moment, Piggyphoto doesn't allow to disable the sensor while idle, so gphoto2-cffi is preferred.

    8.1a Install gphoto2-cffi:

    sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install gphoto2-cffi

    8.1b Alternate: Installing gphoto2-cffi (the hard way): Install cffi

    sudo apt-get install libffi6 libffi-dev python-cffi

    Download and install gphoto2-cffi for gPhoto2

    git clone https://github.com/jbaiter/gphoto2-cffi.git
cd gphoto2-cffi
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

    8.2a Install Piggyphoto:

    sudo apt-get install python-piggyphoto

    8.2b Alternate: Install Piggyphoto (the old way): Download Piggyphoto and put the folder piggyphoto into the Photobooth-directory.

  4. Optionally make the software run automatically on startup. To do that, you must simply add a corresponding line in the autostart file of LXDE, which can be found at ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart. Assuming you cloned the Photobooth repository into /home/pi/photobooth, add the following line into the autostart-file:

    lxterminal -e "/home/pi/photobooth/photobooth.sh set-time"

    For this to work you must install gnome-control-center by running sudo apt-get install gnome-control-center (Unfortunately, this brings along a lot of dependencies - however, I haven't found any lightweight alternative that would allow to simply set date and time using the touch screen).

  5. Alternatively, you can also add a Desktop shortcut. Create a file /home/pi/Desktop/Photobooth.desktop and enter the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=Photobooth
Exec=lxterminal -e /home/pi/photobooth/photobooth.sh set-time

Modifications

In the beginning of photobooth.py a number of config options are available. Change them to your liking.

The GUI-class is separated from the entire functionality. I'm using Pygame because it's so simple to use. Feel free to replace it by your favorite library.

Instead of gPhoto2 you can also use OpenCV to capture pictures. This is the preferred way if you want to use a webcam and is particularly useful for debugging on a different machine. For that you must install OpenCV and its Python bindings (run sudo apt-get install python-opencv) and then change the CameraModule: edit photobooth.py and replace Camera_gphoto as CameraModule by Camera_cv as CameraModule.

License

I provide this code under AGPL v3. See LICENSE.

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A flexible photobooth software

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