Flashbox
Flashbox: Tweet your digital polaroid souvenir, pay with Lightning
Barebone initial description more comprehensive information incl. hardware setup is in the making.
Motivation
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)
Components
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
Working example
Source code
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