We think [Brian Delacruz] latched on to a good idea with this photo printer project. Instead of building a big photo booth for his party he developed a Raspberry Pi based WiFi photo printer. Right now it’s a prototype that lacks the kind of polish necessary to make a true user-friendly device. But the idea is solid and just waiting for you to improve upon it.
In addition to the RPi he’s using a quality photo printer and a small wireless router. The router simply provides WiFi capabilities for the RPi which is running a web server, mySQL, and FTP. This provides a wide range of upload options which he can work with. Watch the video after the break to see him print a smart phone photo wirelessly.
This can be simplified by using a package like hostapd to use a USB WiFi dongle as an access point. Or if the venue already has Internet access a server could be set up with a QR code to guide people to it. The party starts off with an empty bulletin board and guests would be invited to print and hang their own photos which will go into the host’s guest book/scrap book to remember the event.
A good adaptation of this idea would be to ditch the printer and display the pictures as a slide show on your flatscreen (practically all of them have a VGA port.) Saves paper.
A nice idea. Is that a TL-WR70x in addition to the Rπ. Would the print server not have run on that under OpenWRT, or is there not enough memory to do it?
Yeah, the 70xN range would be able to do that without a Pi… Setting up various upload options isn’t difficult at all… Print services via CUPS or CIFS/Samba. Nice hack none-the-less.
exactly, rasppi is used here only for the keyword
a year ago this guy would of made “iPhone Party photo printer”
$26 tplink router with host USB can do the same thing while being cheaper
I use a Polaroid Land camera and some of this Fuji film. Everyone LOVES the Polaroid. You can get yourself a Polaroid Land 250 fairly cheap.
I’m going to go the other way than most of the comments here. Instead of using a router he could have put a wifi dongle on the rPi
Help him? sure if he Open sources it all. I wont help him make a product to sell, unless he wants to pay me.
Apart from the ability to add an overlay, there’s not a lot that cannot already be accomplished with off-the-shelf-devices and firmware.
Print from an iPhone? Get an AirPrint-compatible printer. Print from a camera? Lots of photo printers come with a USB host port and a card reader. Smartphone? Chances are it’ll act like a camera when plugged in.
It’s nice that this solution supports virtually all devices that can upload a picture via a web form or ftp client. However, I imagine that it could become quite tedious if one wanted to print more than two or three pictures. Also, the device needs to provide internet access to it’s users.
I would match this with a photoboop (http://photoboop.com/) to make a true photo booth for cheap.
@Jzatopa: FYI, Photoboop is for sale now at (http://store.photoboop.com)
Disclosure: Photoboop is my project – I’m totally biased when I say it’s nifty.
This is a pretty cool idea. My brother-in-law got a raspberry PI just recently, but he doesn’t even have a printer attached to his PC. Once it goes through some stages of development, this might be good to look into.
Which printer model are you using? Does it have dye sublimation tech?