Amélie
Amélie is a selfie printer that prints photos on cheap thermal paper, reminiscent of old instant photos. The user can tear the print off and take it home, as a souvenir. Over time, the print fades, leaving behind a white piece of paper. The installation combines the ordinariness of a receipt printer with the singularity of the captured moment.
This installation is named after the movie of the same name from 2001. All the components are built into a transparent plexiglass panel, so the user can see the individual modules that make up the installation. The code is written in Python and runs on a Raspberry Pi 4, with a thermal receipt printer and some additional components, like a screen, a camera, and a button with a built-in LED ring.
After pressing the button, the LED ring begins to flash and a countdown appears on the screen; when the countdown reaches 0, a photo is taken and printed instantly. Optionally, a small illustration or text segment can be printed above or below the photo. For New Year's Eve, a random text from a large list of fortune cookie sayings gets picked and printed below the photo, so a New Year's prediction accompanies the selfie. Because the images are printed on thermal paper, no ink is required.
v1 and v2 were built in 2018 with a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, an Adafruit Mini Thermal Receipt Printer, a Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, a small Pi monitor, various buttons and cables and stuff. Coded in Python with the OpenCV Library.
Version 2 got a shoebox enclosure with a status LED and some additional functionality, like saving all images to a usb thumb drive and changing the configuration via a config file.
Version 3 was built in 2023 and runs on a Raspberry Pi 4. It uses the Raspberry Pi Camera Module V3, this allows for faster live preview as well as autofocus and better exposure measuring. It also has a really nice button with LED ring and is built into a plexi panel.
The source code and parts list for v3 can be found on GitHub.
