Sep 11

Updates Updates Updates

Posted on September 11, 2016 by SSilver2k2

Hey All,

Sorry for the long delay in updates. Been extremely busy with the campaign and some personal projects. I needed the break but I’m back.

Good News

The Florida primaries are over, and it is only myself and a Democrat in the race for Florida House District 49. I am currently polling in the high 30s, which is pretty damn good considering I’m an Independent with about $1000 left running against a politician who has raised over $100,000.

Does money help? Of course, but the more I talk to people and tell them my platform, and more importantly, what type of person I am, the more support I am getting. I am so thankful for the wonderful support my friends and family are showing me during this campaign. It’s been amazing so far. Can’t wait until the November election 😀

The PiPlay Advance board is coming together! We have another iteration we are getting ready to test! More news on that soon 😀

I’ve been playing a TON of Overwatch lately, and in a few of the maps, you can run around some arcade machines. They look like traditional Japanese Candy Cabs, and I love them. I really want to make my own real version sometime, BUT, I was able to do the next best thing. A modder released the model files for the arcade into Source Film Maker, and I was able to export them OBJs, convert them to STLs, and then clean them up in Tinkercad, so I could 3D print them.

Sad News

In sad news, last month my Grandfather passed away. I want to thank the other campaigns for offering their condolences and being decent about the whole thing. It took a toll on my family of course. Right after he passed, my Grandmother went into the hospital (for what looks like a heart attack), but she is doing better. It was just a heck of a month.

Today is also 9/11, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention anything about it. I remember 15 years ago, a senior in high school, watching the events unfold on TV in a class room. The administrators were going room by room turning off TVs and telling the teachers to go back to their lessons. I’m glad my teacher turned it back on when they left.

At 17, all I could think about was how my cousins lived in NYC at the time, and hoping they were OK, but not really worried, because they were also kids, what would they be doing close to the towers? I remember a lot of confusion and worry about what was next. I remember a lot of ignorant and hateful comments being spoken in the following weeks, and a lot of misinformation from my fellow classmates. I was just numb.

15 years later, the big thing I take from 9/11 is that we should never respond to these tragic events with reactionary legislation. The PATRIOT Act is probably one of the worst bills that was pushed through during that time. In hindsight we see that, but we can’t forget the lesson in case of future events.

Thank you.

-Shea

Jul 04

Happy 4th of July!

Posted on July 4, 2016 by SSilver2k2

Hey All,

Happy 4th of July! Go eat some hotdogs, grill some burgers, and watch some fireworks. That’s my plan for today 🙂

In other news….

Amazon is selling the Monoprice Maker Select 3D Printer at the incredible price of $279 with Prime shipping! The Maker Select is based on the Prusa i3, and is considered one the very best reprap open source printer. This price point is killer as well, since it is normally $350.

I couldn’t resist and purchased one (so my Makerbot clone will be up for sale in the near future lol). I’ll be posting a review of it soon!

Thanks everyone! Have a great holiday!

-Shea

Mar 04

Friday Post: The Flu Sucks

Posted on March 4, 2016 by SSilver2k2

Hey All,

Sorry for the lack of updates, I got the flu and it kicked my ass! I’ve also been dealing with school, my grandma being sick, work, and just so much stuff on my plate. But yay It’s spring break right now, so I’m back for a bit.

While I was gone the Raspberry Pi 3 was released! How awesome is that! A 64bit Quad Core ARM core running at 1.2ghz with 1GB of RAM AND built in WiFi and Bluetooth. And it’s still only $35!

I’ve also almost finished the Storm Trooper Helmet

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Jan 31

3D Printing TFA Stormtrooper Helmet

Posted on January 31, 2016 by SSilver2k2

Hey All,

I’ve been busy printing out some Star Wars The Force Awakens Stormtrooper helmet pieces. I’ve now printed enough that I can start to put it together.

These are only the first 9 pieces of a 22 piece build.

You can get the helmet files here

-Shea

Jan 09

(Late) Friday Post: and the winner is! Also Monoprice Maker Architect 3D Printer

Posted on January 9, 2016 by SSilver2k2

Hey All!

The winner of the Raspberry Pi Zero giveaway is Aaron! Congratulations! I will be emailing you later tonight!

Onto other news. This has been a hell of a week. Had a small health scare with my grandmother, so we drove 200 miles yesterday to visit her. We spent the night and drove back home today. Hence the late post. Shes doing better, so phew! 😀

This week I implemented a cool video encoding queuing system using Redis and Django. The module I used is called Django-RQ, and it makes it super simple to convert your functions into queue-able objects using the @Job decorator.

This Tuesday is my birthday! Woo! I turn 32. I’m content. I also start classes that night. Yay lol. I bought this as a gift for myself:

It’s a Monoprice Maker Architect 3D Printer for $300. It’s a major upgrade compared to my Micro, but it takes a lot more to get it going. I’ve had it for two days and I’ve finally got most of the settings dialed in.

When I went to visit my Grandma I took along my Kinect sensor and used Skanect to scan her, so I was able to quickly print out a very low poly version of her as a bust.

The Skanect free version limits exports to only 5000 polygons. Once I upgrade I can export at full resolution.

Have a good week / weekend all.

Thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.

-Shea

Aug 28

Friday Post: Cool Stuff for Maker Faire Orlando

Posted on August 28, 2015 by SSilver2k2

Hey All,

First week of the semester is done! Can’t say everything went off without a hitch. Ran into a nasty timezone issue between servers that I just couldn’t figure out. One image, two servers cloned from that image. When pulling the info from Python one reported UTC, the other Eastern. Tried a bunch of different ways to force Eastern, but eventually used this:

from datetime import datetime
from pytz import timezone
fmt = "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S"
# Current time in UTC
now_utc = datetime.now(timezone('UTC'))
print now_utc.strftime(fmt)
# Convert to US/Eastern time zone
now_eastern = now_utc.astimezone(timezone('US/Eastern'))
print now_eastern.strftime(fmt)

So yeah, that was a fun couple days trying to make sure our data wasn’t 4 hours off 🙂 Also, we might be getting hit by a Tropical Storm / Hurricane on Monday. Yay.

Onto the cool stuff! Maker Faire Orlando!

I am working on two projects for Maker Faire. The first is with Factur and FamiLAB. We are making the worlds LARGEST arcade cabinet! It is so awesome. I can’t wait for the electronics to come in so I can help wire it up. I’ll be posting more details as we get closer to the Faire!

The top panel was recently added on, but I couldn’t get a good picture of it because it is about an inch from touching the ceiling of the warehouse, and I just couldn’t get a good angle on it. This thing is massive! It’s a beast!

My personal project is a new modular arcade cabinet.

This is a 3 piece cabinet that breaks down into sections for easy movement, transporation, and customization. My main requirement was that it had to fit in my PT Cruiser, everything from there was negotiable. This is what it looks like so far:

1/3 Model. Cat for Scale.

Team working the ShopBot CNC Machine.

Also!

3D Printed a Bulbasaur using glow in the dark filament!

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Aug 01

Friday Post: Forgetting to set DNS

Posted on August 1, 2015 by SSilver2k2

Hey All,

So for the past month I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out the issue where PiPlay says Could not check for updates. I KNEW it was because of my server move but I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t reproduce it on my end. I really thought that it was because the requests module coudln’t do redirects. Tonight I was dealing with a PiPlay issue with a cool teacher in Canada who is making games with her students, and we were troubleshooting a bad wifi card. We got everything working, and then the can’t connect to piplay server message came up, and I was going to admit defeat, but I then saw it was going to WWW.pimame.org. I had set up www on piplay.org, but I had never setup the WWW redirect on the old domain. I feel dumb. One DNS change and a 5 minute propagation and everything is working now.

On a side note, I designed this warp pipe planter in OpenSCAD, and printed it out today. I drove out to a local nursery and picked up some venus fly traps, and voila! One Super Mario Bros. “Piranha Plant” in my own home 😀

You can download the STL file at thingiverse, and it will be up on my Etsy as well.

Jul 25

Friday Post: Even more 3D printing…

Posted on July 25, 2015 by SSilver2k2

Hey All,

This has felt like one of the longest weeks of my life. Had a couple meetings about Maker Faire Orlando, pushed out some software that 60,000 students will be using in a month. It’s super stressful. Luckily it’s Friday and I can end up sleeping until Sunday 😀

I was hoping to have some cool stuff to show this week about the 3D printing software, but of course at the last minute stuff wasn’t working.

My 3D printer is a Micro3D 3D printer. It’s a small $300 3D printer that is only now just getting people to hack on it. With 3D Printing, you usually have two steps from model to plastic.

The first step is to run your model (an .STL file) through a slicer. There are many slicers out there, Cura, Simple3D, Slic3r, etc. These literally slice your model into layers which are written out as Gcode.

Gcode is an industry standard for 3D Printing and CNC milling that can control extruders, X Y and Z axis motors, temperature controls, etc. Everything your print will do is going to be from a line of gcode commands.

The printing portion is actually a program that reads the gcode and sends it to the printer to act out.

There is a really cool open source suite of tools called OctoPrint, that combines a gcode processor and a beautiful web frontend to manage your 3D Printer. A Raspberry Pi distribution was made call OctoPi which allows you to control most 3D printers from your Pi!

Because the Micro3D is so new, support is just starting to come out for it and the gcode processors are a little iffy at the moment. I was able to get OctoPi to talk to my printer and manually move the axis, but it could not process the gcode properly. Bummer 🙁

I am sure this will be fixed in the coming weeks though. I am really happy with this printer.

Be on the lookout for a new PiPlay image. It’s been too long!

-Shea

This hasn’t been cleaned up yet 😀