This article wasn’t on the blog in 2011. I took it from my old CMS in 2015.

I built this photo booth for our wedding in summer 2010.

I can’t remember where I got the idea, I guess I saw something similar somewhere on the net. After everything else for the ceremony was set I had some time to spend. And this idea…

Hardware

I had most of the needed material at home. Enough wood, a cloth for the curtain, an unused notebook. And a test circuit I built for my USB-projects. I just had to acquire a webcam, a push button like it’s used in moist rooms (how do you call that in english?) and two fluorescent tubes.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the entire booth. It was basically a large box made of oriented strand board, about 2.20m high, 1.20m wide and 1m deep. On one side was the entrance, closed by a thick brown curtain. Inside there was a bank, opposed to it the technology.

Visible there were two simple tubes for the light, a rectangular section with a screen, a small round hole with a lens and said moisture-proof switch.

Hidden behind the wall were an IBM Thinkpad T43 along with a power supply, a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 and some electronics.

I built this circuit since I didn’t want to make the same USB-interface over and over again on breadboard. It is essentially the same circuit as in my USB LED fader, the USB servo or my Dulcimer Keyboards. An ATmega8 microcontroller and some bird seed for the USB interface, at the other end a pin header to interface all unused pins of the controller on the breadboard.

The box was not built to last forever, so I just had two of the pins connected to terminal cables to the push button.

Software

In this project there are two important software components: the photo booth program on the laptop and the firmware on the controller.

The notebook was easy to equip. First I wanted to write a program myself, but after a short search I found something that does exactly what I wanted: Cheese. This is basically a photo booth. You press the space bar, then the program takes four images, at intervals of a few seconds. Simple and perfect.

The microcontroller was not quite as trivial to program, but I already had the solution in the drawer. With a slightly adapted Dulcimer firmware, the circuit behaves just like a simple USB keyboard. I just had to see in the schematic which pins I had to connect to create a space key.

In combination with the moisture-proof push button I probably had the only wet room space bar in the world!

The combination worked perfectly: you go into the box and see the large display. After pressing the button, there were four consecutive pics taken, each with a short countdown.

The pictures end up in a directory and each has the recording time in the file name. That allows to rearrange the pics with a nice one-liner, so the result is a big picture with the full series of four images:

Results

I had assured that I would not put the images into the net, so there is only one unrecognizable example. The names of people and the original contents of the bottle are withheld.

The quality has really surprised me. The camera makes really sharp and detailed images, and the fluorescent lights illuminated everything pretty evenly.

The box was used at the wedding-eve party and at the actual wedding. From the eve we’ve got more than 500 images, from the wedding even more than 800. Almost all the guests have found their way into the box, most of them repeatedly. And in packs: on some pictures we see at least seven people at once…

The curtain has proven to be a terrific feature. On many of the pictures you can see that the people did not expect that we can see the pictures lateron…

We are happy about each image. By means of that box, and above all the spontaneity of our guests, we have truly unique memories of one of the best days of our lives. Thanks again to all who joined us!