Phototron – Part 1 – A Christmas Gift
In October of 2023, my wife decided she wanted a photobooth for our Halloween party. That wasn’t unusual—she’s always been into photography, and over the years she’s set up plenty of DIY booths with lights, cameras, props, and backdrops. This time, though, she had her eye on a very particular machine: a Polaroid-branded photobooth sold by Arcade1Up, available only from Urban Outfitters.
It was sleek, it was playful, and it was exactly the vibe she wanted.
But there were two problems: it had already been discontinued, and the secondhand ones cost a small fortune.
The spark
She was ready to settle for a tripod phone stand in the booth so guests could snap their own shots. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that Polaroid machine. It was fun, but it also looked… buildable. I had a Raspberry Pi or two lying around, cameras, even a small photo printer. And I’d stumbled across PiBooth, an open-source photobooth project for Raspberry Pi. People were using it with everything from bare monitors and keyboards to kiosk-style enclosures. Some of the builds were crude, some polished—but all inspiring.
She didn’t believe I could throw something together in time for Halloween (fair enough—our week was already packed, and my track record for on-time projects is… spotty). But Christmas was coming. If I couldn’t buy her the Polaroid booth, maybe I could make her something even better. A bigger screen, a real printer, lights, and her own branding.
The plan
I started sketching ideas. I wanted something that looked intentional, not cobbled together. I played Tetris with the parts I was sourcing—a touchscreen display, a Pi, a camera, lighting, and a compact dye-sublimation photo printer.
The Polaroid unit became my design reference point. Rounded edges, clean face, simple layout. I added space for lighting on the sides of the screen, her photography logo at the bottom, and a camera at the top with room for a glowing ring of LEDs. White body, bold accents, protective clear face panel. It would look sleek but also personal.
Building a gift
Piece by piece, it started to come together. A portable touchscreen monitor, a Raspberry Pi 4, an older Pi camera, some LED strips, and a Canon Selphy photo printer.
The printer was the heart of it. Dye-sublimation meant real photo quality, the kind you’d expect from a retail print. It wasn’t meant to be mounted vertically, but with some tweaks to the paper tray I got it feeding properly. By Christmas Eve, the machine wasn’t perfect, but it worked: it could take photos and print them right there.
I wrapped it up and gave it to her as a gift.
Why it mattered
On the surface, it was just a photobooth in a box. But to me it was more than that. It was something she could use without worrying about the messy wiring and code inside. To her, it was simple: touch the screen, take photos, print memories.
To me, it was also the start of something bigger. I’d discovered limitations in PiBooth, run into quirks with the camera stack, and realized I wanted to build something more flexible. That’s where Phototron was born—the software that would eventually power this machine and others like it.
But at its core, it all started as a Christmas gift.
Next time, I’ll dive into the build itself: how the enclosure went together, the hacks to make it all fit, and the lessons learned.
And after that, we’ll get into the Phototron software, where the project really started to grow.