piPalette

A modern web interface for the Polaroid ProPalette 8000 film recorder.

The ProPalette 8000 was a high-end digital-to-film recorder sold in the late 1990s. Decades later, working units are still out there — but the software that shipped with them ran on Windows 95 and connected over SCSI cards no modern computer has. piPalette replaces that toolchain with a browser-based interface that runs on a small Raspberry Pi next to the recorder. Point any phone, tablet, or laptop on your home Wi-Fi at it and you've got a tidy modern workflow for exposing real film from digital images.

What you can do with it

Manage film tables. Drop your .FLM recipes into a library. Each table is shown with its film stock, format, and color/B&W mode; click any one to see its 4K and 8K transfer curves.

Build rolls. A roll is the unit of work — an ordered queue of images paired with one film table. Drag images in from your desktop, reorder them by drag-and-drop, set per-image options (resolution, crop/fill, rotation, background colour), and skip anything you'd rather leave out.

Expose to film. Expose a single image with one click, or hit Start exposing to print the whole roll sequentially. Watch the recorder work in real time — calibration phase, scanline progress, elapsed time and ETA on the active frame. When you need to stop, the recorder finishes its current frame and waits for you.

Run on the LAN. Everything happens through a browser at http://pipalette.local. No client software to install on your laptop, no cables to your desk — the Pi sits beside the recorder and serves the interface to whichever device you grab.

See the user manual for the full walkthrough.

Getting started

You need three things:

• A Raspberry Pi 3B or newer with a PiSCSI v2 HAT (or any Linux machine with a SCSI HBA).
• A working ProPalette 8000, with a SCSI cable to the Pi.
• A microSD card and Raspberry Pi Imager.

Step 1 — Prepare the Pi

Use Raspberry Pi Imager to write Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Bookworm, 64-bit) to your microSD card. In the Imager's customization dialog, set:

• Hostname: pipalette
• SSH: enabled, with your password or public key
• Wi-Fi: your home network credentials
• A user account name and password you'll remember

Insert the card into the Pi and power it on.

Step 2 — Install piPalette

Once the Pi is on the network, SSH in from your laptop and run the installer. From here on, everything is automated:

ssh <your-user>@pipalette.local
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/veroc/pipalette/master/deploy/install.sh | sudo bash

The installer takes a couple of minutes. When it finishes, piPalette is running as a service on the Pi and starts automatically every time the Pi powers up.

Step 3 — Open the app

From any device on your home network, open http://pipalette.local in a browser.

The first time you open it, head over to Device and click Scan. With the recorder powered on and connected, piPalette finds it and connects automatically. From there: upload a film table, create a roll, queue up some images, and you're ready to expose.

Updates

When new versions are released, piPalette can update itself. Open the Device page, scroll to System, and click Check for updates. If a newer version is available, Update now pulls it down and restarts the service in place. No SSH, no manual steps.

Trying it without a recorder

Curious but don't have a PP8K wired up? On the Device page, switch the Mode to Mock. piPalette runs against an in-process simulator: you can create rolls, upload images, queue exposures, and watch the runner go through its phases — without actually exposing anything. It's the easiest way to evaluate the software or get comfortable with the workflow.

Documentation

The user manual covers every page in detail — per-frame options, the exposure runner, the device panel. Markdown sources are in docs/ if you want to read them on GitHub.

Hardware notes

piPalette is a plain Linux application, so it doesn't require a Pi specifically. Any Linux host that can talk SCSI to the recorder works:

• A Raspberry Pi with a PiSCSI HAT is the recommended path — inexpensive, low-power, fits in the same enclosure as the recorder.
• An old desktop with a real SCSI HBA, or a laptop with a PCMCIA SCSI card, both work too.

The Pi installer covers the most common case end-to-end; for other hosts the steps adapt naturally (skip the PiSCSI-specific bits, point piPalette at your /dev/sg* device).