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reuterbal / photobooth

A flexible photobooth software
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
316 stars 158 forks source link

Success story 1.0 #65

Closed botyas closed 5 years ago

botyas commented 5 years ago

At last I was able to put the photobooth in use at a friend's wedding and everything went well. At first I had problems with the screen saver because with the commands that appear in the installation it did not work for me.

Then one of the guests stretched a photo before it finished printing and the printer was blocked for a few minutes and some photos were not printed.

Solved those first problems everything worked perfectly and we could enjoy making photos of all the guests.

After this first start-up I realized some things that still need to be polished and I'm already working to make the necessary improvements so everything is perfectly.

Describe your photobooth I assembled all the devices in a wooden box with openings for the webcam, monitor, and push-button. through the back door you access the printer to change the cartridges and in case of any problem you can quickly access the interior.   In this box, and due to lack of time, the printer tray is out for quick access to replace the paper. This was a problem since some guest tried to take the photo before it finished printing. Now I am mounting a ramp to place the printer inside and that only the photo will fall when I finish printing.

Hardware:

Software:

Problems:

Pictures:

img_20181025_231948 img_20181025_232014 img_20181027_013814 fondo_photobooth

reuterbal commented 5 years ago

Hi @botyas thank you for sharing your success story!

I have made the same experience: the printer is sometimes the weakest link. Especially when there is a queue of pictures to be printed, it sometimes gets stuck (simply showing "busy"). Usually the fix is pulling the power cord of the printer and turning it back on however, sometimes single jobs get stuck in the CUPS queue and need to be restarted by hand.

Proper lights are a recurring issue. I solved it with a cheap studio lamp.

What I find strange is your countdown issue. Does this also occur if you use a different camera?

botyas commented 5 years ago

I forgot to comment that when the printer ran out of paper or had to change the cartridge it was in an error state and did not reprint until it enters

Where do you get the light so that it lights when you take the picture?

I have mounted a plate with the pins as samples in the connection image of the development version and the LED of the trigger button does not work for me. I had to put it straight at 12v and it is always on. I have already seen the lighting that I am going to use, but that pin or another one is not lit at the moment of the photo.

I'm also looking at how to make the relay activate a relay to turn on the printer, because it does not turn on alone I do not like having to be opening to turn on and so on.

I will also put a wifi relay to turn on and off the entire system from the mobile.

My idea is to leave everything as simple as possible so that you just have to light and enjoy.

I do not know about the meter because at home the times I've used it worked well, but when I took several pictures in a row, it started to slow down. I do not know if by the print queue or by something else that was in the background.

I hope to be able to solve all my problems before December, which is when I have to use it again so I can have a more stable system with fewer problems

reuterbal commented 5 years ago

In my case, when the printer runs out of supplies it is sufficient to replace them and it continues to print automatically.

The light is a simple always-on studio lamp. Additionally I'm using an RGB-strip for some illumination that does also light up bright white during capture. However, this adds only little to the total lighting.

What do you mean by putting the trigger LED directly to 12v? Of course if it is not connected to any GPIO pin it is always on. For 12V LEDs you'll have to have some transistor (I'm using a MOSFET) to switch the 12V power of the LED using the 3.3V GPIO pins.

sratxp commented 5 years ago

What I find strange is your countdown issue. Does this also occur if you use a different camera?

I do also have the issue with slow countdown. If I increase the resolution to Full HD the countdown is tremendously slow. My solution was to go to 720p resolution. I believe the problem is that raspberry is to slow for high resolutions as on my laptop I don't have any issues with countdown.

reuterbal commented 5 years ago

That is quite possible. Actually, I have never checked what resolution my DSLR produces when being asked for preview pictures. I should probably include a reduced resolution into the OpenCV-wrapper during preview - I think some visible pixels during preview are bearable if this means a smoother preview with high fps-rates. Would you agree?

sratxp commented 5 years ago

Sorry I should have been more specific. I've meant the desktop resolution. I'm not sure whether changing the desktop resolution has any effect on the preview resolution. But I do aggree with you that smoother preview is more important than preview resolution.

botyas commented 5 years ago

It can be, I did all the tests at home with my Canon 60D DSLR and the time worked fine. I also tried other webcams and did not notice much difference. But the one that I put in the end is one that they gave me the same day and I could not do all the tests. The resolution of the webcam is FHD 1080 so it is very possible that it is due to that.

Edit: For the screen resolution I do not think it's because my monitor is 4: 3 and it does not even reach HD 720

botyas commented 5 years ago

which transistors you have used to control the trigger LED and the RGB strip. I have put an IRF520N and I can not get it to fire.

reuterbal commented 5 years ago

I am using an IRLZ34N (specs). The IRF520N (specs) won't work as its maximum gate voltage is 4V but the GPIO pin will only deliver 3V. Thus it does not fully turn on.

botyas commented 5 years ago

Version 1.1 in progress. He has already made several modifications and adjustments while waiting for some other component to finish the rest.

whatsapp image 2018-11-05 at 20 43 20 1

whatsapp image 2018-11-05 at 20 43 20 2

How can I not add new outputs to the GPIO inside the program? I think I'm going to use a relay in the same output as the LED on the button to connect the illumination lamp.

There is still to finish configuring the router to connect to the raspberry and download the images.

To see if you get a system to share the images online or locally without affecting much to the operation. I will now finish what I have in hand and will make a clean installation to verify that the slowdown of the account back is not due to the fact that the server was in the background for the gallery website.

reuterbal commented 5 years ago

The printer setup is pretty neat! To add new GPIO outputs you have to modify gpio/init.py. Simply add them in initGpio() similar to lamp and enable/disable them at the relevant states. If you want to have the pins configurable instead of hard-coded, you will have to add them to the gui as well.

Using a car headlight is probably the easiest if you can keep the drain current below 30A (or, to be safe, 20A).

Considering the problems with CPU load during preview, I suggest to either keep the functionality to share pictures locally as simple as possible or preferably, do this on some external service.

botyas commented 5 years ago

I do not know if I'm doing it right, the idea would be that when starting the relay starts for 2 seconds and to turn it off again for another 2 seconds. I'm thinking of taking another line from the printer so that when the printer is on, put a positive pin and when it is off in negative to know at all times if the printer is on or off.

alopezbu commented 5 years ago

I am using an IRLZ34N (specs). The IRF520N (specs) won't work as its maximum gate voltage is 4V but the GPIO pin will only deliver 3V. Thus it does not fully turn on.

And @reuterbal the resistors you are using are of 12 KΩ +10% ??? Just to verify ;D

reuterbal commented 5 years ago

They are 10 kOhm - does not really matter, simply use something large.