How it started

An appliance for parties? Why? How did it come to be?

A few years ago, back in late 2021, a good friend of mine asked me if I'd be able to build a simple photobooth for his girlfriend's birthday party. Tinkerer's mindset, I just said "it will be done."

I never thought I'd get so passionate about this project. It quickly evolved from a small proof of concept in python quickly cobbled together on a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and a webcam in a few lines of code to a much larger project.

This PoC was a success, doing exactly what it was made for, but it was SLOW. REALLY SLOW.

I then started a rewrite in Golang with React, technologies I'm much more familiar with than pygame and even though it might be arguable to use a web browser for an appliance, it was the right call.

The first new feature I had in mind was the timelapse. What if this appliance was taking picture by itself every five minutes and generated a timelapse at the end ? So I added it.

Then came the karaoke, which required a bit more thought...

Let's add a karaoke feature ! It will be fun !

But wait, I need the users to be able to choose a song... Let's make a backend for them to enqueue the songs

But wait, what if we don't have internet? The photobooth needs to make its own wifi hotspot !

But wait, the RPi 3 doesn't seems to handle displaying the webcam, the audio, the parsing of the CDG file that well at the same time, let's put a full computer in there (To be fair, it might be my code's fault)

But wait, I need microphones, so I need to tinker with PulseAudio to have a loopback (spoiler: it never worked, we used an external microphone, but I'm determined to make it work with this new release)

But wait, singing is cool but why not add the singer voice on a different channel so that we can set the volume of it however we want, to help on songs we don't know well enough?

But wait, what if the background still showed the webcam so it can still be used as a photobooth while singing ? And keeping the timelapse feature during karaoke session?

But wait ...

Oh while we're at it, now that the photobooth needs to be hooked up to speakers, why would we even need a separate device to listen to music ? There's this Spotify Connect client that would work well..

Yeah, that quickly got out of hands. But in the end, it became a real novelty for our parties and helped create a lot of memories.

A few month ago, I got enough comprehension about my own project that I decided to rewrite it all to be cleaner, adding the server syncing so that I don't have to link zip file to everyone, and that I can wipe the appliance whenever I want (and it will keep the song library synced automatically).

At the time I'm writing this blog post, I am nearly done with the rewrite but I'm not done with the feature set I want to include.

Here's the next things I'm planning to work on once everything is working properly, in no particular order:

• Quiz: I already 3d printed 4 buzzers but never got them to work how I want
• Blind test: Since we already have a Spotify client, why wouldn't we use it to make a game
• Hardware flash: Blinking the screen white is ok-ish, but a real hardware flash to take picture would be better!
• Lighting & fog machine: The karaoke is neat, but what if we synchronized light and a fog machine to the sound of the songs ?

Here are some early pictures of when we built the hardware for the PoC (also with my cat Rose):