Postcard-portrait-plotter

Flow

Taking a picture

• A visitor presses the countdown button
• The button is wired to a Arduino, which sends a keyboard shortcut to the mac.
• The shortcut triggers the Photo Booth countdown.
• A picture is taken
• After a couple of seconds the picture is copied to a source folder.

Plotting the picture

• An operator presses the plot button
• The button is wired to a Arduino, which sends a keystroke to the mac.
• On the mac, there is a terminal process running, which waits for a certain keystroke.
• When the the 'plot' command is received, a series of scripts are executed:
  • The oldest picture in the queue gets selected
  • The picture is cropped to a postcard-ratio, taking the position of one ore more faces into account. smartcrop
  • A Python script then transforms the cropped picture into a line drawing (SVG) linedraw
  • The SVG gets simplified and optimized for plotting with vpype
  • The optimized SVG is then plotted with the AxiDraw
  • Finally, the original pictures gets deleted to clean up the queue.

Features

The plotter script has a couple of options:

p - Plots the oldest picture in the queue.

l - Lists all the pictures in the queue with their timestamp.

t - Toggles the plotter pen in its up or down position. Useful when mounting the pen.

d - Disengages the plotter motors. This way you can move the plotter head freely.

c - Draws a "calibration" picture.

q - Stops the script.

Start

• Make sure that all the cables are connected to the computer. Seems obvious, but we've all made that mistake once before, right?
• Open Photo Booth on the extra screen, open this project in VS code on the operator screen.
• Now start the script by running npm start in the terminal

Installation

linedraw

download and unzip in project directory

linedraw

Python Environment

Yeah, good luck with this one...

Creating a virtual env

python3 -m venv env

python -m pip install https://cdn.evilmadscientist.com/dl/ad/public/AxiDraw_API.zip

pip install opencv-python
pip install Pillow
pip install vpype
pip install rembg

PIP/Pillow issues?

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade Pillow

vpype on M1 https://vpype.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html#installing-using-pipx-apple-silicon-m1

Google ZX

Replace Bash with JavaScript

npm i -g zx

Vpype

The Swiss-Army-knife command-line tool for plotter vector graphics. stable release

Rembg

https://github.com/danielgatis/rembg

installing this on a M1

AxiDraw CLI

https://axidraw.com/doc/cli_api/

Troubleshooting

• The terminal running the plotter script, needs to be in focus to receive the keyboard input that the Arduino sends.