Flashbox: Tweet your digital polaroid souvenir, pay with Lightning
Barebone initial description more comprehensive information incl. hardware setup is in the making.
In my setup, all pictures are tweeted on the Faces of Lightning (@faceslightning) Twitter profile.
Use case: Put up a photobox at events or public locations to allow your audience to take a digital polaroid souvenir, pay a small fee, tweet it automatically and make your event hashtag trending.
Technical: build an autonomous Lighnting Node on very minimal hardware, namely a Raspberry Pi Zero, that has only one core and 512 MB memory
- Step 1: the Flashbox uses an external server to create Lightning invoices & check payments (working)
- Step 2: the Flashbox is a completely self-reliant Lightning node without external support (in progress, probably not relevant IRL, but a nice challenge)
You can easily build this yourself with:
- Raspberry Pi Zero W (with wifi) -> $18
- Display Shield 3.5 TFT touch screen for GPIO -> $16
- Raspberry Pi Zero Camera -> $20
- Micro SD card (4GB+) -> $5
- physical touch button & a few wires
The Python program uses these main libraries:
- gpiozero: use the GPIO pins to attach physical stuff like buttons
- picamery: take picture with the Pi Camery
- wand: process images with ImageMagick
- tweepy: tweet the picture
There are additional programs necessary on operating system level:
- ImageMagick (package
libmagickwand-dev) - FFmpeg
- other stuff, will be added soon
The lighting integration is amazingly simple, both for API and on-device lightning. Most of the code is picture processing.
- Flashbox (API): flashbox-api.py
- Flashbox (on-device): coming soon