Son of a Boof!

I got a request to bring my Mobile Photoboof to a Bar Mitzvah but the venue had a flight of stairs... That's a common theme in the land of Boof rentals, "we'd love to have the Mobile Boof but the venue's door is too narrow", etc. So Justin and I built Son of Boof pretty much in a night, here's some pics of the construction process.

We were supposed to be set up by noon on Saturday, this is 10pm Friday. If you were a shark you'd smell blood in the water:

We're probably already a bit bleary eyed, but you know us, anything for a Bar Mitzvah! Well, that and $1k:

"Yeah, this'll work":

I bought a brand new Canon IP3000 on Craigslist for $50 on the drive over, my favorite Boof printer: dirt cheap generic inks, really reliable and fast, and discontinued hence $50. Here it is stripped of all the crap, making it much easier to spot paper jams and see at a glance whether it's printing. And I wired a remote LED that blinks when the printer needs attention so I don't have to watch for crestfallen kids (see the Hardware section in the forum for tips on that):

The camera is in place, Justin testing the frame, 4am, 8 hours until showtime:

The guts are somewhat in place. Note the printer positioned to drop the pics into a chute that opens out the side, and the laptop facing backwards so we can open the door that'll eventually cover the back and we can monitor what's going on, and in front of all that is a TV which'll display the pics. The TV didn't work that well though, much more grainy than a regular computer monitor, so next time I'm using a flat panel:

We played with that rake type structure on the roof, but thought it might be a bit too abstract for the venue:

Note the curtain rod hanging off. This is a really portable design, just the main unit, and then the steel curtain rods bolt on easily, and black curtains frame out the booth:

Uh oh, the clock on the wall says 6am:

And we havn't even put the rear door on yet, much less painted anything:

We put the door on and realized we have no paint rollers... So 7:30am and I sacked out. I woke up 9:30, more rested than I've ever been after 2 hours of sleep, and saw this. I really like the picture frame around the monitor, and below that you can see the hole for the Canon Powershot A85 camera, and next to that is the big red backlit button, and on the left side you can see the door where the prints drop from the printer:

And a surprisngly un-frazzled Justin:

Another shot because it's so damn good. I think those aluminum corner pieces are a great touch, they were like $12 each at Home Despot:

So we packed everything up, watching the clock every second, and drove to the Bar Mitzvah about 45 minutes late but nontheless appreciated by anyone under 40. It's in the scriptures that Boof Shall Dominate Any Venue, And Thus Boof Did. We caught a bit of sniping from the woman running the goofy Polaroiod picture booth, she said "you're not much for punctuality are you", which is fair enough, but there was a note of competition in the way she said it. Within 10 minutes there was a line for the boof that pretty much never stopped all night, while Polaroid lady had plenty of time to eat more latkas.

I couldn't take pics since the only camera I had was running the boof, but here's a couple of quick ones I took afterwards while we were taking things down:

What you see inside the boof:

The Bar Mitzvah itself, believe it or not, was pretty fun. The hired MC was a serious pro of the Bar Mitzvah circuit, he brought a stage, a DJ, a boom mic so he could be out on the floor while showing the kids dances, and he brought 3 cyborg super kids who would mingle with the regular kids and do the dances. Absolutely incredible dancers, here's them in The Boof, of course they instantly did one of the best strips of the night:

It was hilarious watching them flirt with the regular kids, and then of course right when the party ended they didn't want anything to do with them. And then I found out they had another Bar Mitzvah to go to after this one. Oy.

Here's the rest of the pics the Boof took at the Bar MItzvah.

And then transporting the Boof back home, on the back of Jackie's pickup: