Hobby · May 2026

Photobooth

Upcycled, and fully custom — a portable photobooth built for real events.

I’ve always been a photographer at heart. There’s something irreplaceable about capturing a moment and knowing people will still be looking at it years later. At the same time, I kept seeing the same demand everywhere: weddings, birthday parties, school events, company parties... people want a photobooth, but the rental prices are painful and the machines themselves are often closed black boxes.

So I decided to build my own.

Design philosophy

Maximum upcycling. Minimum cost. Full control.

The entire enclosure started life as a wine box. The motherboard is the one I pulled out of my old Acer Aspire A715-41G. The 10.1" tactile screen came from AliExpress. The Canon EOS 100D and the Godox MS300 flash were both scored on LeBonCoin for a fraction of what they cost new. No thermal printer, they are too expensive, finicky, and add another point of failure. Instead the booth uploads every photo to a Cloudflare R2 bucket. Guests simply scan a QR code and type the event code to download their pictures.

The build

The wooden wine crate became the outer shell. Inside I built a rigid aluminum-extrusion frame to add rigidity. A round hole on the front lets the Canon lens look out; the screen sits below it. The Godox flash with a softbox sits on top on a custom machined mount.

Power comes from a single 230 V supply. A 4G modem keeps the machine online even when the venue Wi-Fi is terrible.

The software

Everything runs on Pop!_OS.

I didn’t want another closed commercial photobooth app. The whole UI and capture pipeline is a custom PyQt6 application (most of the heavy lifting written with Claude under strict version control and continuous testing on my side). It talks directly to the Canon via python-gphoto2 for live view and full-resolution capture, composites optional overlays, then pushes the JPEGs to Cloudflare. Event codes are just folders in the bucket. Simple, reliable, and completely under my control.

The reality of hardware

Two classic problems showed up quickly.

First, the USB 3.0 ports on the old Acer board hated the Canon. Random disconnects, freezes, the usual. A cheap USB 2.0 hub fixed it completely.

Second, heat. After twenty minutes the camera would start dropping frames or crash the PTP session. A small 5 V fan and a couple of exhaust holes drilled in the top of the box solved it. The machine now runs for hours without drama.

Result

The booth has already done several real events. People walk up, strike a pose, and a few seconds later their photo is online. No paper jams, no ink to replace, no monthly software subscription. Just a wooden box that used to hold wine, an old laptop board, and a camera I bought second-hand.

It feels exactly like the kind of project I like: take what already exists, make it do something new, keep the cost low, and end up with something that actually works in the real world.