• Finished Hardware Assembly

    michaelalink05/01/2015 at 03:49 0 comments

    The photobooth is together, well at least together enough that I am going to give it a trial run at a friends wedding this weekend.

    The Outside:

    As of now only the start button is wired, and I changed it to a green button since that seemed more start-ey even though the big red button looked really fun. The three buttons on the right side are not wired but when they are they are supposed to be an up, down, and OK button so large groups can request additional prints after the photo shoot.

    The Inside:

    Raspberry Pi:

    Well if you are on here you have probably seen one of these before so moving on.

    Switch / LED interface board:

    ULN2803 takes the 3.3V IO from the PI and switches the 5V from the power brick for the LEDs. Blue LED on the right is a status LED, whenever the board is connected it turns on. The switches are wired directly to ground and the GPIO of the PI. Hiding under the ribbon cable you can see the edge of the real time clock for the PI, still having a little trouble with the software for that guy.

    Power / USB connectors:

    Power comes in through a locking Neutrik connector. Above that is a composite video out (not yet wired) the though being that could run to an external monitor and people can watch. Two USB ports above that, they just pass through to the PI; one for the printer, one for a keyboard to shutdown etc.

    The Camera:

    Pi Camera in the middle, and two white LEDs on the top right, turned on when the picture is taken. Looking at upgrading my beautiful camera cutout ...

    LCD Driver Board:

    Not overly exciting, came with the LCD, hooked it up to 5V (instead of the called for 12) and it works fine.

  • Got Some Hardware

    michaelalink04/01/2015 at 16:16 0 comments

    Using what I believe was an old camera equipment case, for the case. Big Red Button is going to be Start, Yellow buttons are for Up and Down arrows and Green Button for OK. LCD is 7" mounted it in a 5x7 picture frame, I was having trouble making a bezel for it, still need to matte it so the screws don't show. Camera is going to be mounted above the LCD.

    The arcade buttons came with 12V lamps, I ordered replacement LED lamps, which I didn't look at voltage requirements on, they also take 12V (makes sense). Going to replace the resistor in the LED lamp so I can run them on 5V, then everything can run on one large 5V supply.

    Up next mounting the electronics inside.

  • Print head cleaning

    michaelalink02/14/2015 at 19:24 0 comments

    Bought a used Sony thermal dye-sub printer. Printer came with a ribbon and 5 inch wide paper for 5x7 prints which printed beautifully. I loaded the 6 inch paper and ribbon which had streaks about 1/2 inch from each edge (really bad streaks). The destructions from Sony say your supposed to use their cleaning ribbon to fix that ... which I don't have, and don't want to spend ~$100 on.

    So off to the internet to find how to manually clean the print head. I followed this video to get to the print head (did not remove it)

    Printer top removed:

    Printer print head lifted:

    The actual print head:

    the actual printing part is the thin line below the brownish traces fanning out. The print head is a bit discolored where it looks like it was only ever used to print on 5 inch wide paper.

    To clean it I used thermal printer cleaning pens I bought off amazon. They are marker full of Isopropyl Alcohol, they make it really easy to scrub on the head. I scrubbed the head for a little while with the cleaning pen, then wiped with a lint free tissue, I did this until the tissue stopped coming up dirty.

    After I wiped down all of the rollers with alcohol.

    The printer is now reassembled and working with no streaks, the first few prints had some spots and such on them from getting dust in the printer during cleaning, those went away after a few prints.