Monthly Archives: May 2013

May 31

Friday Post: Writing is Exhausting!

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Hey All,

Writing is exhausting, and tough, and mentally taxing.  I love it, but wow, this is a new experience   I don’t really have any updates for this week.  I know Nick_Tones is anxiously awaiting more PiMAME stuff.  I’m sorry I don’t have anything this week.

There was an askreddit thread earlier this week about what do people do with thier Raspberry Pi?  There are some amazing projects in there.  I really want to try doing a Raspberry Pi weather balloon launch with the University. I also posted PiMAME to the thread and I got an additional 1700 visits.  That blew my mind.

I’m going to leave you with this, Patrick Stewart being awesome:

Have a good weekend!

-Shea

May 24

Friday Post: More Neat Things!

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Hey all,

Another long week over here.  I’m glad we have a 3 day weekend, because I could use it.  Going to sleep until Monday I think 🙂  Anyways, onto the fun stuff!

Book

So, I’ve been waiting ages to announce this.  I have been tapped by a publishing company to write a book about a computer that means a lot to me (hint hint).  That’s really all the details I can announce at this time, but I’m very excited and eager to work on this project.

BarCamp Orlando

Last week I talked about BarCamp Orlando.  It was a lot of fun.  There were a lot of great talks given by members of the Orlando tech community.  I met a lot of cool people, and networked with some fellow educators.  It was also nice to see a big turnout of my coworkers and friends from FamiLAB show their support of this conference.

I did a talk about gaming on the Raspberry Pi, and I have to say it went fairly well.  I have grown to really like public speaking, and I am very interested in doing more.  I did about 15 minutes of explanations and demos of the Raspberry Pi’s capabilities, and another 10 minutes of QA from the audience members.

330173_4699890302737_534318985_o

Thermal Imaged Pi

I received an email from Bux (from the forums) the other day.  He acquired a thermal scanner, so he used it to take a picture of the Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi - Thermal Image

Weston  Accelerated X

A very exciting development in the continuing optimization of the Raspberry Pi has been released.  A release of the Weston software that allows accelerated X windows to be displayed on the Raspberry Pi.  This should help with the sluggish feeling that is encountered when using the GUI.  I will be testing this out over the weekend.  The instructions to install it are available here: http://fooishbar.org/tell-me-about/wayland-on-raspberry-pi/ and below:

echo deb http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy rpi >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install weston

Stickers

I think I have sent out all the stickers.  If anyone hasn’t received theirs, please contact me again!


Have a great weekend everyone!

-Shea

May 17

Friday Post: Neat Things

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Hey All,

It has been a long week.  Star Trek Into Darkness was AMAZING!  Go see it now.  Stop reading.  Go to your theater, watch it, then come back here and finish reading.   It was that good.

SanderSiezen has made a really slick cocktail arcade cabinet, powered by PiMAME.  His entire build log has been published at his site.  I’m really impressed by the hinge used to hide the controls.  Great Job!

mame_arcade_table1 mame_arcade_table4

 

BarCamp Orlando

BarCamp Orlando is this weekend.  It’s basically a tech gathering un-conference.  People meet up in a central area, sign up to do talks, speak about awesome things, and network, all while enjoying the bar scene around downtown.

I am hoping to do some talking about PiMAME and the Raspberry Pi.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Shea

 

May 16

Raspberry Pi Camera Quick Look

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Hey All,

I got my Raspberry Pi Camera board in the mail today!  It was very easy to install.  The hardest part was waiting for apt-get upgrade to complete.  After that was done, a new camera option is available in raspi-config, and some new applications are available to run.  The apps are raspivid and raspistill, which takes videos and photos respectively.

I haven’t spent a lot of time with the software, that’s for the weekend, but I did try taking some pictures via the command line.  This is going to be an awesome add on!

Photo May 16, 5 03 27 PM Photo May 16, 5 04 03 PM Photo May 16, 5 04 38 PM Photo May 16, 10 00 43 PM

i i.jpg1

 

-Shea

May 14

Cooling a Raspberry Pi with Liquid Nitrogen

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Ok, this is seriously cool! (no pun intended)

The folks at linkxs.org decided to try running a Raspberry Pi under liquid nitrogen, and seeing how it performed.  Like a beast apparently!  It runs pretty stable at -100C.  The ethernet port is only rated to 0C, so the fact that it still worked and they could stay SSHed into the machine is awesome.

Great job guys!

http://linkxs.org/freezing-a-raspberry-pi-in-liquid-nitrogen/

-Shea

May 04

Friday Post: The Pi Hut

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Hey all,

Sorry for the lateness, I went and saw Iron Man 3 last night and got home late.

Go see Iron Man 3.  If you liked the first two movies, you will like the third.  I thought it was great.

A fun announcement: The Pi Hut is now selling SD Cards with PiMAME preloaded on it.

If you are using the installer script, make sure you run the update script, as I have pushed a few changes.  The PiHut SD card already has the installer script included.

Have a great weekend!

-Shea