Photobooth

Raspberry Pi 4B photobooth framework for Capturing Time Photography. Supports single-shot and multi-shot strip modes with per-shot review, S3 upload, and ESC/POS receipt printing.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 4B (Raspberry Pi OS, Python 3.7+)
• Canon EOS DSLR via USB / gphoto2
• NeoPixel (ws281x) LED panel — 8×32
• PBM-8350U thermal receipt printer (ESC/POS)
• Three momentary buttons on GPIO 23 (green), 24 (red), 25 (blue)

Package Structure

photobooth/           ← installable Python package
photobooth_web/       ← Django kiosk web app

See ARCHITECTURE.md for a full component map, asyncio design, template system reference, capture flow diagrams, and GPIO wiring.

Running the Booth

The booth runs as a systemd service on the Pi:

sudo systemctl start booth
sudo systemctl status booth
sudo journalctl -u booth -f          # or: tail -f /var/log/booth_stdout.log

The entry point is the photobooth-run console script (installed at /usr/local/bin/photobooth-run by pip install). It's defined as a [project.scripts] entry in pyproject.toml and maps to photobooth.booth_main:main. Top-of-file constants in photobooth/booth_main.py control the active camera, template, and S3 bucket — no code changes needed for routine configuration.

photobooth-clear (mapped to photobooth.booth_clear:main) is invoked from ExecStopPost= to dark the NeoPixel and LEDs on service stop.

Installing on a Pi

sudo pip3 install "git+https://github.com/capturingtime/photobooth.git@vX.Y.Z"

Pulls ctp-utilities as a transitive dependency from its matching git tag. The ESC/POS printer, NeoPixel, and GPIO deps are listed under [project.optional-dependencies.rpi] and aren't installed by default — pip install ".[rpi]" for hardware setups (the Pi already has the apt versions of RPi.GPIO and Adafruit-Blinka so this is rarely needed in practice).

Development

Install (non-Pi, for tests only)

cd photobooth
python3 -m venv env
env/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
env/bin/pytest tests/ -v

Hardware-dependent imports (RPi.GPIO, neopixel, board, boto3) are wrapped in try/except ImportError in __init__.py and are not required for running tests.

Django tests

cd photobooth/photobooth_web
python3 manage.py test mainscreen

Templates

Compositor templates (PNG + JSON sidecar) live at /opt/photobooth/templates/ on the Pi. Screen overlay PNGs live at photobooth_web/mainscreen/static/img/. See ARCHITECTURE.md § Template System for the full schema and compositing pipeline.