We have a tradition here of hosting a party during SXSW (booze and tacos, no badge required).
Now that I’ve recovered from survived SXSW, I thought I’d talk about our latest project: The Wobblr
In the wake of last year’s party, we discovered that the only record of the awesomeness was in our (slightly boozy) memories. Sadly, not a single picture was taken of the epic festivities. Girded by the desire not to repeat past mistakes, we decided to pool our collective talents and construct an Event Data Recorder, aka photobooth.
I know what you’re going to say. Yes, we could have rented one. Yes, many events this year had snazzy models that spit out pictures of you, say, sitting on the Iron Throne (FYI, we will rule Westeros). But, we’re a creative design agency and we figured, “Hey, why not build it ourselves? In a week and a half? We can get buttons…LEDs… and while we’re at it, why not build a nice cabinet for it? Get it internet enabled? And just for fun, let’s make it do this:
Design
So we did what we do best: we worked together to come up with great ideas, threw half of them out, made a couple of false starts, and eventually settled on a design that balanced elegance with practicality.
First, the false start
This was fun to weld, but ultimately it wasn’t stable enough, made camera alignment difficult, and revealed a little too much of the inner workings.
Next, the immaculate design
We are huge fans of reclaimed wood furniture at thirteen23 but alas it wasn’t in the budget and this initial design represented too much risk for the time we had left on the clock. So, we reduced the feature set and came up with something we could get to market and iterate on.
Last, the buildable design
We reduced the feature set and came up with something we could get to market and iterate on.
Construction
While the box was simple, there were a few tricky bits to cut out for LED indicators, button, and iPad screen holes. We had precise measurements, so we needed precise tools. In this case, we opted for a Shopbot. Thanks to a magical wonderland called TechShop, there happen to be two of these at our disposal.
Internals
Now that we had a cabinet, we needed to fill it with awesome:
- 1 MacBook Pro
- 2 iPads
- 1 Arduino
- 3 RGB leds
- 1 LED bar w/ blue LEDs
- 1 Big-Ass-I-know-the-answer-on-Double-Dare red button
- 3 Logitech webcams
Scenery
Any good photobooth requires a backdrop/greenscreen to create that perfect t-rex chasing you kind of experience. We didn’t want to break up the party-feng-shui with a big backdrop, so we decided to laser cut some vellum balls and light them up with LEDs. Easy to do, nightmare on the fingers to assemble—but worth it.
Results
Ship it!
But how did the pics turn out, you ask? Here are a couple of my favorites:
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Conclusion
In the end, we were all really happy with the way it turned out, and it was a blast to see people using and enjoying it. Of course, that didn’t stop us from taking usability notes and iterating in our heads about how much cooler v2 could be.
Be sure to visit Wobblr.com for more action shots. If that’s not enough for ya', take a look at the full time-lapse of our party.