Category Archives: Baby

Dec 31

2018

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Hey All,

I almost didn’t blog for the whole year. To be truthful, it’s been hard to write this past year. Lots of amazing wonderful things have happened to me in 2018, but I’m exhausted. And this blog was easy to overlook. I want to write again, but at my own pace. I’m going to try to start again.

That said…. BEING A FATHER IS AWESOME! I have an amazing little mini me who is 20 months old and is just so much fun. He has made me grow in ways I never even knew imaginable.

Maker Faire Orlando 2018

My friend Jacob and I worked on an awesome project for Maker Faire Orlando this year, and I am so proud to say we won Maker of Merit! It is a deep honor to me to win that award. And of course it’s Raspberry Pi related 😀

We made a 4096 LED pixel framebuffer display powered by the Raspberry Pi!

LED Display playing a clone of Snake
Prototype at the Orlando Science Center

How it works?

We are using P10 LED panels as the basis for the screen. P10 means a 10mm dot pitch, so 10mm between each LED. They range from 3 – 10mm. The panels also usually come in a size of 16 x 32, but luckily they are daisy chainable!

The Raspberry Pi can even handle upto 32 of them in 3 chains! For our purposes we only used 8 16×32 panels in one chain.

8 P10 Panels, daisychained to an Adafruit LED matrix bonnet, connected to a Raspberry Pi 3b+, with power distributed via a CFOL Distro 8 board.

The above picture may look complicated, but it’s not that bad.

8 P10 panels are daisy chained together using a standard HUB75 cable (it’s like an smaller IDE cable).

The panels are mounted together with the orange and red 3D printed brackets.

The first panel is connected to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ via an Adafruit LED matrix bonnet.

The power for the panels and the Pi comes from a 10amp DC supply, which plugs into the bonnet. The bonnet powers the Pi, and has two screw terminals for the voltage output. The +/- screw terminals connect to a CFOL Distro 8 PCB (in the center of the board) which takes the input and breaks it out to 8 screw terminals. We only need 4 since each cable powers two panels, but it gives us room to expand.

After that we use https://github.com/adafruit/rpi-fb-matrix to copy whats on the HDMI framebuffer out onto the LED matrix!

and Voila! You now have a giant low resolution display!

Many thanks to Adafruit for making such a great beginner tutorial that we could jump from, and building a great bonnet for the Pi!

Happy Making and a Happy New Year! Here’s to a wonderful 2019 everyone!

-Shea

Aug 23

Gone too long!

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Hey All!

I’m sorry about the lack of posts. Being a Dad is the most amazing time consuming adventure I have ever been on! I am currently on paternity leave, and of course I thought I would have tons of down time to post and update….all the parents are collectively shaking their head.

He’s 4 months old now!!!  Can you believe that?!

More updates soon.  I got some awesome Nintendo stuff to post.

-Shea

May 20

PiPlay Portable – Last Day

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Hey All,

This has been an exciting week.  The PiPlay Portable is fully funded, and we have less than 12 hours to go on the Kickstarter!


Sam has been growing so fast!  I love being a Dad.  It’s an experience I am so happy I get to have, and of course I have 3D scanned him and got him 3D printed…

 

I also won the Community Leadership award from IMS Global at the LILI conference.  I had no idea I was even nominated!!  I am really humbled by this.  Thank you IMS!

Apr 28

Friday Post: PiPlay Portable is fully funded! And meet the newest member of the PiPlay Team!

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Hey All,

The PiPlay Portable Kickstarter is fully funded!!!  Thank you to all of you.  We are super humbled and excited that we get to see this kit succeed.

In even more incredible news….

I’m super excited to introduce our son, Sam, born Monday April 24th.

Mother and Baby are doing great.  We came home from the hospital yesterday.  I’m so excited for this new chapter in our lives.

Have a great weekend all,

-Shea

Feb 03

Friday Post: No broken foot and open source software is awesome!

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Hey All,

Got some great news.  My wife didn’t actually break her foot.  We went to a orthopedist who specializes in feet injuries, and he says it’s only a MAJOR sprain.  She’s still in pain, but at least it is a lot less serious.  The brace only needs to be worn during the day, she can walk around again, and best of all she can drive and go to work.

Baby is also doing well.  We are in the third trimester and he is kicking up a storm!

Also, open source software is amazing, and I am so proud to be able to make software that is open.  My campaign donation software is now being used in a city council race!  This is not an endorsement, but Scott Casey is using it for his race: https://www.scottcaseycitycouncil.com/

Have a good weekend all!

Jan 20

Friday Post: Broken Foot

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Hey All,

It’s so weird to realize it was my birthday, and it passed by this year with little fanfare from me.  Knowing I’m having a baby in less than 3 months kinda takes your mind off those things.  What is on my mind is my wife broke her foot this week and I am now taking care of my pregnant immobilized love.  Luckily the baby is perfectly fine.  I feel so bad for my wife.  I have broken both arms, and both legs (at separate times), and I can tell you this is no walk in the park.

Everything is still being worked on, just going slow and steady.

Have a good weekend everyone.  Stay safe out there.

-Shea

Jan 07

Friday Post: 2017! New Year New Stuff!

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Hey All!

Happy New Year! Less than 99 days till the baby is due. I’m building stuff for the nursery, getting stuff ready. Feels more like demolition because it was our game / media room and most of the week was spent moving stuff out.

I installed my first ceiling fan today! Feels good, feels accomplished.

I am also working on a homemade DDR pad for Stepmania. It’s still not great on the Pi2/Pi3. I can get it running at 30FPS, but the audio is too choppy. I want to try to offload the audio to a USB sound card and just output it via HDMI, but I don’t know if that will help.

Found an awesome Mario mushroom power up beanie.  This kid is going to be a geek 😀

The PiPlay Advance board is coming along!  I am super happy with it and it’s almost ready to release!