Pimaton is now installable via pip!

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Introduction

Yesterday was a small step for me entering the world of python packaging :)

As you’ve read before I’ve decided to create a photobooth application for raspberrypi for a wedding in August. Last time, I posted some pictures of the pimaton in action during an evening with a friend.

Since the code seems stable and usable (all MVP features are done but one: the GPIO button), I decided to follow my beloved “release early, release often” principle and create a pip package so Pimaton can be installed easily on a raspberrypi.

I won’t spend time on how I created the package, as there is plenty of documentation about it online already, and the process is pretty straight forward :). The important thing is that it is now possible to boot a raspbian on a pi and install pimaton in 2 minutes. The package page is here

Click on the image below to see a quick gif of the GUI (NOTA: The camera stream is not shown here as PiCamera handle it on its own above X, check the video to see it fully. And the print option is disabled):

Figure 1: Pimaton UI gif

Figure 1: Pimaton UI gif

You can see it working on quick video here: {{< youtube HJ43O-nPQzw >}}

Installation

Now pimaton can be installed as simply as:

    # Install dependencies:
    sudo apt install python-pip libjpeg-dev
    pip install -U pip
    # To enable GUI:
    sudo apt install python-tk python-pil.imagetk
    pip install pimaton

Then, duplicate the default config file to start modifying it:

    cp /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pimaton/assets/default_config.yaml /path/to/myconfig.yaml

And then edit the configuration file. Read carefully the comment before editing everything :) If you have X installed, I strongly suggest using the GUI for now by changing the ui_mode to gui:).

Then you can start running pimaton:

    pimaton --config-file=/path/to/myconfig.yaml
    pimaton --config-file=/path/to/myconfig.yaml --debug # verbose mode.

What can it do so far:

  • Take pictures and generate a final picture with thumbnails of the taken picture (by default 6 pictures that will be displayed on 2 rows and 3 columns)
  • Print that picture if a printer is plugged in
  • Very configurable:
    • TUI (very basic for now) and GUI mode

    • Multiple start input (keyboard, touchscreen and GPIO soon)

    • A template file (image with decoration to be the base of rendered image) can be used

      • A empty template with placeholder can be generated to help the template image creation
    • Picture size (taken by picamera), thumbnails (printed pictures), number and disposition of final rendering

    • Time between steps / loops

    • All texts

    • Print is an option, number of copies can be configured.

    • All picamera settings can be overridden.

More information can be found on the README.


Contact

If you find any issue or have any question about this article, feel free to reach out to me via email, mastodon, matrix or even IRC, see the About Me page for details.

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