Happy Thanksgiving everyone. This marks the beginning of the holiday season. I hope everyone gets to spend it with wonderful family and friends.
-Shea
Nov
28
Monthly Archives: November 2014
Nov
23
Late Friday Post (yeah it’s Sunday): IAAPA! Super Smash Bros!
Hey All,
Sorry for the super late post. The weather changes here in Florida knocked me on my butt. I’ve been in bed for the past two days trying to get over this cold. Going from 40 degrees to 70 to 80 back to 40 just messes with me. It also didn’t help that I ran myself ragged on Friday.
IAAPA
So Friday was the “members of the public” day at IAAPA. IAAPA stands for International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, which means that if you ever wanted to see how a ride works, or where to get new arcade machines, or pretty much anything within the amusement / coin op sector, this is the place. I go every year and it is always a blast. The biggest noticeable trend this year is how un-3d everything is. 2 years ago every ride and game had a 3D gimmick to it. Now, pretty much nothing is 3D except for the big ride experiences.
This year some of my coworkers went with me. They enjoyed themselves.
Super Smash Bros.
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U came out this weekend. Holy crap it is amazing. I had friends over on Friday, we played 8 player smash, and it was a riot. I will have the image of me playing as Samus getting the smash ball and taking out all 7 of the other players in one final smash attack burned into my memory for a very long time.
It’s a beautiful, well made, extensive game. I have no idea how long it is going to take me to unlock everything.
The game also includes support for Nintendo’s new NFC characters called Amiibos. Think Skylanders but different. For now, the way they work is dependant on each game. For Mario Kart 8, it just unlocks new outfits. In Smash Bros, they act as a super smart CPU character. The figures are really well made and look good sitting on display.
I’m still trying to get some of the NFC info from them. I’d love to write a program to back up the data, but it’s hard finding info on the MIFARE Ultralight chip it identifies as.
If you have any info please let me know!
Have a good week all,
-Shea
Nov
15
Friday Post: MakeSmith CNC Router
Hey All! Happy Friday!
This has been a “short” week for me. Had the day off on Tuesday for Veterans Day, and today campus closed early because our football team is going up against Tulsa. Go Knights!
PiPlay happenings! Mark has been working on an advanced database scraper tool.
It’s going to be awesome once it’s get a little more polished. I’ve been working on some more controller stuff. I’ll have more to say about that soon.
MakeSmith CNC
A few months ago I backed the MakeSmith CNC router kickstarter. The project was created to design and sell a CNC mill / router that cost less than $200.
My kit arrived yesterday, and I’ve gotten what appears to be the base put together. The instructions are in the form of a bunch of YouTube videos, so I’m watching each one a few times, and then attempting the install. I have forgone using wood glue at the moment, just in case I mess up or need to redo something. I figure I will just reinforce the joints after everything is attached.
Have a good weekend all!
-Shea
Nov
07
Friday Post: DISPMANX_vnc and Homepass
Hey All,
Happy Friday! I want to send a Very Happy Birthday to my Father. This weekend is his birthday and I’m very proud to be his son.
I’ve been very busy these past few weeks, I’ve been contracted to write a second edition of my Raspberry Pi Gaming book, and it’s taking up a lot of my time. Even though its a subject I’m very familiar with, i’m finding out tons of new things I can do with the Raspberry Pi that have cropped because of my need to record and capture things coming from the Pi’s framebuffer.
I’ve been using a few tools, mainly ones involving DISPMANX to copy the framebuffer into a png file. It’s called raspi2png and it works really well. Sometimes its difficult to trigger raspi2png at the right time though.
One thing I have always wanted was a way to ssh / tunnel into the actual console terminal. Not a new tty device, and not from XWindows, but the one that displays on /fb0. Enter dispmanx_vnc. I had never thought of using VNC to tunnel the framebuffer, but Hanzelpeter has done just that with dispmanx_vnc
There’s definite input lag, and I can only achieve about 15fps, but it is the best way I’ve found to record and capture straight from the framebuffer right now. I can ssh into my Pi, run the dispmanx_vnc command, then use a VNC viewer (I used tightvnc) to control the main display. I’m so excited about this 😀
Other news, if anyone has a 3DS, then you know about StreetPass. It’s a way to virtually meet others who are around you with their 3DS. There are a bunch of mini games built into the 3DS that require you to meet people using Street Pass in order to advance. There is also Street Pass Relay, which Nintendo created last year. This allows those who are connected to a Nintendo Zone wifi access point to StreetPass with others from around the world, who are also connected to a Street Pass Relay. So of course this has been reverse engineered, and you can now turn a Raspberry Pi into a “HomePass” StreetPass relay.
Original instructions here . There is a premade SD card available here, but I have yet to try it out.
Have a good weekend all!
-Shea