Building an Underwater Photo Booth: Pt 1


My current project is a collaboration with Jack to build an underwater photo booth.  It lets users take four photos with the push of a button, then uploads them to a cloud drive so folks can post pics of themselves at the pool as soon as they dry their hands off.

The back.  The red part will be 3D printed.

There are numerous great online instruction manuals for building a photo booth using a Raspberry Pi, so that part was the first which we completed, and it went pretty quickly.

The hardware consists of five key parts:
  • A Raspberry Pi mini computer, which runs the camera.
  • A Raspberry Pi camera module, which is similar to the kind of camera in most cell phone
  • A display screen.  This is a small LCD screen that cost about $40.
  • A display control board.  I don't fully understand that magic that makes this work, but it takes the images that the Raspberry Pi sends over an HDMI cable, and it translates them so the LCD screen can make images.
  • A battery to power it.
  • And a button that works through the waterproof housing.
The current step has been constructing an underwater housing for the photo booth.

I'm enjoying this, because building an effective watertight enclosure has been the prohibitive step of building my ROV for almost a year, so this offers me an opportunity to approach the problem with fresh eyes.  We've bought panels of acrylic, which we now need to glue together using acrylic glue.  If it works, we'll test that it's waterproof and then install the hardware inside.
I'll go over some of the specific parts more in an upcoming post, but Here are some more images of the current design.

On the left is the display and the display board.  On the right in the Raspberry Pi and its camera, and a temporary button. 

The plan is to attach it to a PVC frame with weights at the bottom. We haven't decided yet on how to decorate it.
Another shot of the back.  The battery is velcroed into place.

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