OH HAI! go to instacrt.com!

ZOMG Update I
InstaCRT is released in the AppStore (and beeing featured everywhere!) ^__^. Read more!

ZOMG Update II 2012-11-18
InstaCRT with color support was just released! Read more on how it works! ???

This project started as an idea to see how a “real world” filter for photos (like the popular Histamatic and Instagram apps) would work, except our filter is actually real and not digitally applied.

When I joined the project, Ruben Broman and Erik Wåhlström were more or less already done connecting all the hardware and had the screen working as a regular external screen connected to his old laptop. The same night I hacked together a funny looking Ruby script that fetched images from a ftp server, downloaded them and showed them in fullscren on the old CRT display while a Canon 7D took the photo. We managed to get it up and running the same night and even had time to throw together a quick iPhone application that uploads the photos to the ftp server.

This early version of the project used the Ruby script, Image Capture (built into OS X) and QuickTime 7 to display the photo in fullscreen on the little display. The day after I added a Tumblr uploader so the photos get published on the blog.

This worked but was very instable so all code was rewritten within the first week it was up and running, mostly for stability but also seperated into different smaller scripts to they could run asyncronysly. We replaced QuickTime with a Quartz Composer project that allowed images to be displayed in fullscreen while not beeing the forground application, and replaced Image Capture with the command line tool GPhoto. Everything was still controlled by Ruby scripts but, as written above, seperated into three smaller classes/files so they could work in parallel, with a main deamon file using Forever The ftp server was replaced with a smarter REST based server to handle the uploading, downloading and archiving of the images.

The iPhone app was also rewritten from scratch to be cleaner and smarter. As of today, about 30 people have the beta (distributed using awesome Testflight).

Except for some smaller tweaks, the current version of the project has been up and running for about a month without restart nor crash so I would say it’s pretty stable now. We haven’t really decided exactly what to do with the project right now. We might release the app to the public and keep it going for as long as it’s possible, or just see InstaCRT as a fun hack.