POLASCII

Pol(aroid)-ASCII - an ASCII version of a Polaroid-like camera

For more information please find the project web site here: https://terryoy.github.io/polascii/

This is a small project intended for public demonstration. It captures a picture from the camera and prints a ticket with a thermal printer which contains a link to a full ascii image of the picture. It was intended to run on Raspberry Pi with Picamera and AALib(ASCII Art). However I found the performance is not compromising, so I also wrote a PC version together. The two versions are put under pc and rpi folders respectively.

Install

For PC version, it needs opencv for the camera; PIL for image processing; aalib for ascii rendering; pyserial, pyusb, python-qrcode, python-escpos for the thermal printer.

# aalib (sometimes it's already installed)
$ sudo apt-get install libaa1
$ sudo pip install python-aalib

# python-opencv
$ sudo apt-get install python-opencv

# install PIL (or Pillow)
$ sudo apt-get install libjpeg8 libjpeg8-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev
$ sudo pip install PIL

# install pyserial
$ sudo pip install pyserial

# install python-escpos, pyusb, python-qrcode
# you need to download these packages first and install them manually
# python-escpos: https://python-escpos.googlecode.com/files/python-escpos-1.0-1.zip
# pyusb: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pyusb/PyUSB%201.0/1.0.0-beta-1/pyusb-1.0.0b1.zip
# python-qrcode: https://github.com/lincolnloop/python-qrcode
# unzip them and then run below
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

# create a sqlite3 database for handling the failed pictures and re-upload
$ sqlite3 queue.db
create table upload (host text, service text, name text, data blob);


# remember to change the paths defined in main.py (e.g. "output_path" and "url_prefix")
# then execute the main program(or testing program for debugging)
$ sudo python main.py

Test

After install the dependencies, you can go to the /pc/test or /rpi/test folders to look for some test scripts that proves your installation works.

# (for PC) 
$ cd pc/test
$ python opencv.py

# (for RPi)
$ cd rpi/test
$ python test.py

note: if you want to test the thermal printer, it needs root priviliges to access the USB device, so don't for get to use a sudo.

Some Key Controls

The main program is "main.py". When running it, you can modify brightness or contrast parameter by pressing below keys for tuning while displaying in various places.

• [, ] - decrease, or increase the picture's brightness.
• -, = - decrease, or increase the picture's contrast.

CREDITS

This project is a work of community contribution. Thanks to the happy guys below:

DD@SZDIY		- for the Raspberry Pi and the camera
Danfei@SZDIY	- for the thermal printer
Laowang@SZDIY	- for the case

author: terryoy@SZDIY
website: http://szdiy.org/

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License

GPL V3

Copyright (C) 2014 terryoy

Polascii is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

Polascii is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Polascii.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.