Snapping Stills with the Red TED Letters

I’m a bit of a TED talk fiend, so I was delighted to find out that a few Raspberry Pis had a hand in letting TEDsters capture their photo along with the iconic red TED letters at TED2015 in Vancouver. To explain: A funny thing happens at the end of every TED — after the show wraps, first one brave person, and then duos and groups, rush the stage to get their picture taken with the red TED letters. So at TED2015, our tech team thought, why not bring the letters out to the conference floor and let everyone play? In a nights-and-weekends project, our engineers built a self-service photobooth that encouraged all TEDsters — attendees, staff and more — to strike a pose. By the end of the conference, 1,296 photos had been taken with the booth. "A lot of people wanted to get jump shots," says software engineer Joshua Warchol, who helped conceptualize and build the booth. "Some groups would spend 10 minutes trying to get the perfect aerial moment. And I also had not anticipated that people would feel an unstoppable compulsion to climb the letters. We had to get them repainted mid-week because of nicks and scuffs." We see a lot of people implementing great photo booths with Raspberry Pi, but what I especially like about this one is that it’s activated when a group scans their NFC badges. After the photo is taken, it automatically emails it to the group that badged in. Of course, the whole operation comes together with a lot of different off-the-shelf technologies working in concert. Along with the Raspberry Pis, there’s a tablet interface, Adafruit NFC reader, a camera, and a BlinkStick LED module to indicate the camera’s position and status. Luckily for us, Joshua posted all the details about how he pulled this off, including the code. Thanks, Joshua! The post Snapping Stills with the Red TED Letters appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

URL: https://www.raspberrypi.org/snapping-stills-with-the-red-ted-letters/