Raspberry Pi Camera Struggles

Last week I was asked if I could build a photo booth for this years Christmas party. As example I was shown this fun photo booth based on the Raspberry Pi. See the video here.

I was told to keep it simple and use whatever open source projects I could find and focus on the device itself rather than an extensive set of features (KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid). Luckily someone had already open sourced a nice simple version of a Raspberry Pi photo booth, see here. The one thing that is missing from this particular version that the other one has is a build in flash function. So after a little bit of digging around I found that you should be able to change the firmware on the Raspberry Pi to enable the flash by default. 

So I get borrowed a Pi 2 model B+ and a camera from and friend and followed these steps to get the flash working. And it was giving me heaps of problems. Turns out the documentation is a bit out of date. So here is what I did. This is based on my install of Raspbian (not a Noobs install). Some of these steps are slightly modified from the ones I found while researching possible solutions. Credits to the people on the Raspberry Pi forums helping each other out.

Update: I added my flashdriver as a file below the instructions on how to generate it yourself.

Update: download the file below instead of running the steps above.

dt-blob.bin
File Size:	39 kb
File Type:	bin

Download File

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Connect a LED with a resistor between pin17 and ground.

Now in your GUI go to Start->Programming->Python 3 (IDLE)
Insert the following python script: 

Finished Photo Booth

For the finished photo booth and some build instructions visit my photo booth project page.

Save it Ctrl+S and run it with F5.