Introduction

Hello and Welcome to the Introductory blog of 96Boards Photobooth. With the Linaro Connect HongKong coming up in next few weeks, we 96Boards team thought of setting up something cool which can be placed in the hallway. Suddenly this Photobooth idea sparked our mind and we decided to make one for us and showcase that during connect. Crazy isn’t it? Yeah, that’s how we approach our work ;-)

96Boards Photobooth

The idea behind this project is to create a Photobooth using one of the 96Boards and showcase that during connect. But it is not only limited to Linaro connect, if people find it more attractive and fun we can even place it in our 96Boards booth at whatever conference we take part in!.

So we decided to create a Photobooth and the first preparation would be to choose the harware platform. I have some craze for the CSI cameras so I planned to use the CSI camera sensor OV5640 which seemed to be occupying my desk for quite some time. Then, we have to choose the base board to interface this camera. With 96Boards we only have CSI support (along with V4L2) for linux available in Dragonboard410c only. So obviously we have to choose that. For connecting the camera sensor with Dragonboard, we opted for D3 Camera Mezzanine. For this category, we also had the option of chosing AI Star Vision MIPI adapter but due to the board availability and some factors we ended up with D3.

CSI support for Dragonboard410c comes with V4L2 interface which makes it easy to use this camera with OpenCV.

The overall outlook of this project is, camera will capture the frames and display the preview on screen. When a user comes, he will press the push button available on the photobooth setup. That will initiate the countdown timer of 5 seconds and when the count lapses, image will be captured.

Then the user will be given some options of choosing the funny masks like the Santa hat or funny mustaches. After selecting the masks, 96Boards watermark will be applied to the lower end corner of the image and saved onto the cloud. For making it available to the user, we may show the QR code for the image or the image will be sent to the user’s mail-id.

Project Roadmap

As like the previous projects, I have partitioned this project into a series of parts:

Part 1: Image capture using OpenCV
Part 2: Applying funny masks and watermarks to the image
Part 3: Final demonstration of the 96Boards Photobooth

BoM

Below is the Bill of Materials (BoM) needed for project recreation.

Conclusion

This is one of the more fun type of project we do at 96Boards. I hope that this project will grow much bigger to be placed in most of the conferences where people gather for Fun + Innovation :-)

Stay tuned for the next part!