Photo Booth
June 2009
The whole system is mostly cobbled together from spare parts.
Hardware
- old laptop with at least two USB ports; screen removed
- 17" LCD monitor with the stand removed
- camera is an Olympus C-5060
- Arduino microcontroller (switches are wired to this then the Arduino sends commands to the computer)
- various switches and pedals (for triggering the software/camera)
- hard shell suitcase
- mount from a really cheap table top tripod
- 25' of black fabric
- 20' of PVC pipe
- various PVC pipe fittings
Software
- Windows 2000
- Photobooth (custom VB.NET application; source at http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/photobooth)
- Cam2Com
A very high level view of the system is this: A button is pressed which sends a command to the Photobooth software. The software interprets the command and sends another command to Cam2Com. Cam2Com triggers the camera. The camera takes a picture. Cam2Com downloads the photo from the camera to the computer. The Photobooth software detects the new photo then displays it on the screen.
- button is pushed
- serial command is received by the Photobooth software
- screen is cleared
- "Get Ready" message is displayed
- Photobooth invokes Cam2Com
- Cam2Com triggers the camera
- camera takes the picture
- Cam2Com downloads the image from the camera to a specified folder
- Photobooth watches for a new image file to appear in the specified folder
- Photobooth loads the image for display
- Photobooth creates a cached thumbnail version
- the system is put back in a ready state
All of the source code for Photobooth and for the Arduino microcontroller is available here http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/photobooth. The Cam2Com software I had to buy. The reason for that is because I'm using the older Olympus C-5060 camera which doesn't support newer computer-to-camera protocols. There is an alternate version of Photobooth (Photobooh_WIA) that does not require Cam2Com but it does require a camera that can operate in PTP mode and Windows XP or higher. I've used it quite successfully with a Nikon D40. The software the principles are the same as teh non-WIA version. The nice thing is that Photobooth_WIA is capable of triggering the camera and downloading the photos so you can cut out the Cam2Com layer.
As for the physical setup I just got an old hard shell suitcase from the Goodwill. I mounted the monitor in the lid and used dense foam to make a cradle for the laptop in the bottom half of the suitcase. There are a few photos of the setup here http://cardboardrobotics.com/photobooth.asp. And a few additional photos of its various iterations here http://www.flickr.com/photos/robotsareeverywhere/sets/72157605111189961/.
I looked at the software alternative gPhoto which looks great but only runs on unix/linux operating systems. You could probably do something much simpler on a Mac. It comes down to how clean you want the interface to be. I wanted to strip it down to just the photo and a status message and the quickest way for me to do that was writing the Photobooth application.
I intend to post a wiring diagram for the Arduino and switches/pedals in the near future.