It’s a well-known fact in capitalist societies that any product or service, if being used in a wedding, instantly triples in cost. Wanting to avoid shelling out big money for a simple photo booth for a friend’s big day, [Lewis] decided to build his own.
Wanting a quality photo output, a Canon DSLR was selected to perform photographic duties. An Arduino Nano is then pressed into service to run the show. It’s hooked up to a MAX7219 LED matrix which feeds instructions to the willing participants, who activate the system with a giant glowing arcade button. When pressed, the Nano waits ten seconds and triggers the camera shutter, doing so three times. Images are displayed on a screen hooked up to the camera’s USB HDMI port.
It’s a build that keeps things simple. No single-board PCs needed, just a camera, an Arduino, and a monitor for the display. We’re sure the wedding-goers had a great time, and we look forward to seeing what [Lewis] comes up with next. We’ve seen a few of his hacks around here before, too.
Nice build!
Small error in the article : The screen is connected on the camera’s HDMI port, not USB ;-)
Thanks! Fixed.
But you can’t print the photos? Seems a shame if they just get kept by the bride/groom.
There would be some ways to add it, depending on what the camera supports. Simplest would be if it supports wifi printing and you get a wifi printer. Then next, it’s easy to find a printer that will print from USB storage, but that may mean plugging and unplugging the camera if in storage mode it doesn’t do anything else.
Any photo-manipulation, or is every shot the “perfect” one?
I’ve been thinking about how to do this actually and the weddings I’ve been to with say Zink (a propriatory thermal colour paper) printers there is no paper left pretty fast and loads of discarded “bad” shots.
Which is a (expensive) terriable waste (not only for those who are climate-woke).
So certainly there needs to be some barrier to printing to dissuade spamming it, the paper should probably be “cheap” with an option for more professional prints.
My “ideal” setup then would be like the above with a cheap small photo printer on to cheap photo paper with cheap inks. But also backing up every shot which could then be available to buy or even hosted online… if PG13 – Again an issue at the weddings I’ve been to is some of those discarded shots were… not so child friendly.
Plenty of websites offer photoprinting as a service and will hook into your own site to allow people to print what they want.
The cheap shots on the day could be kept for those present or have notes written on the back and maybe pinned to a shared wall.
God, maybe I ought to be a wedding planning that is way too fun.
Thanks for this! We run a photo booth rental company, but this is a great idea for anyone looking to do it on their own!