Very cool. I made a Pi thermal printer photobooth almost exactly two years ago that worked on the same principle, although I wasn't crazy enough to try and cram

Very cool. I made a Pi thermal printer photobooth almost exactly two years ago that worked on the same principle, although I wasn't crazy enough to try and cram it into a Polaroid shell. What seemed like a simple exercise turned into more research than what I thought I had tolerance for on a side project. IIRC from my experience there were two big problems: 1. versions matter when it comes to printer drivers, OS, and your hardware combo, and 2. the data buffer on thermal printers is not big enough for what you want to do (which is why it spits out random chars and symbols instead of your photo). The printer I was using had a buffer pin but ultimately I was short on time and patience so I opted instead to use imagemagick to convert and compress the photo before sending it to the printer. I used the booth for my nephew's birthday party and it survived real world use pretty well. You got a nice physical souvenir (I also added a "Happy Birthday" + date overlay to each image) and I set up a local server on the Pi that let people browse the digital versions of all the photos with a framework called Sigal. Very fun hardware project and I intended to publish a writeup outlining all the sharp corners I navigated but never got around to it.