Category Archives: Friday

Jan 09

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

Posted on by

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:

138611

 

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.

12506821_10104783547948412_992828713_n

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

Jan 01

Friday Post: …and a happy new year! 2016!

Posted on by

Hey All,

Happy New Year!  2015 was an amazing year.  I learned a lot this year.  Had some ups, some downs, some all arounds, but mostly, this was a great year.  I’m pleased to have shared it with all of you.

To start off 2016 right, I’m giving away a Raspberry Pi Zero. Just fill out the form and in a week I will select a winner and send it out.

Have a wonderful 2016 everyone and thanks for reading.

-Shea

Dec 05

Friday Post: TGIF

Posted on by

Hey All,

TGIF!  Thank goodness it’s Friday.  This has been a trying week.

For the bad: I had a little food poisoning, had a small car issue, and dealt with an anxiety attack of epic proportions (hooray for an understanding doctor’s office / doctor.)

For the good: Got most of the kickstarter parts in.  Found a really cool edge case in a program we developed at work, and was able to fix it!  Also pushed a large project out to AWS for work and it worked.  The more I use AWS for large scale applications the more I love it.  Still afraid of vendor lock in for my personal projects though.

AND I got my Raspberry Pi Zero in!

This little guy is cool!

IMG_20151203_205459840 IMG_20151203_205532614 IMG_20151205_245916656 IMG_20151205_245926609 IMG_20151205_245937360 IMG_20151205_245957094

 

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Nov 27

Friday Post: Raspberry Pi Zero

Posted on by

Hey All!

Happy Friday, Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Black Friday, Happy Raspberry Pi Zero Day!

So yesterday the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched a new Raspberry Pi board, the Zero.

rsz_img_4054It’s TINY!  And only $5 dollars.  So far it’s a Pi 1 clocked at 1ghz, 512MB of RAM, Micro USB for power, Micro USB for peripherals, GPIO pins but without headers, and a mini HDMI port.  The latest edition of the MagPi is going to include one in every issue.

They already seem to be sold out online, but I was able to get the starter pack on Adafruit for 29.99.  It was worth it since I don’t have a mini HDMI or micro USB to full USB adapter.

Adafruit $5 Raspberry Pi Zero

Adafruit $29.99 Raspberry Pi Basic Pack

Right now I’m full of Turkey, and spending time with family.  I hope you all get to enjoy this time as well.

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

 

Nov 20

Friday Post: IAAPA 2015

Posted on by

Hey All,

Happy Friday!

I was lucky enough to be able to attend a day of IAAPA again this year.  IAAPA is THE worldwide Arcade and Amusement expo.  I’m fortunate that it takes place in Orlando, FL, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get this opportunity.

One of the highlights of the trade show was that Sega was there showing off the new to North America “Luigi’s Mansion Arcade”.  This has been in Japan for two years now, but this is the first time (other than one location test) that a Luigi’s Mansion Arcade unit has been in the States.  It’s a very neat game.  It’s an on rails shooter game, where your gun is an all in one flashlight and vacuum cleaner.  You stun the ghosts with the flashlight, then suck them into your vacuum.  It’s a lot of fun, and I hope it gets translated and a few places pick them up.

In Raspberry Pi related news, the Mag Pi has just released their Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book!

Pi-Projects_Cover-495x700

 https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/official-raspberry-pi-projects-book/

200 pages of things to do with your Raspberry Pi!

Enjoy all!  Have a great weekend!

-Shea

 

Nov 14

Friday Post: Less than 24 hours left on the Deskcade Kickstarter!

Posted on by

Hey All!

Less than 24 hours left on the Deskcade Kickstarter!  So excited!!!

On  a related note, I picked up a Steam Controller to see what the hype was about.  It’s cool, but what’s really neat is that it can be a keyboard, mouse, or gamepad at the same time, depending on the game.  Whats not cool is it requires steam to be running to set that.

ss_d2f5e7325666df6119ff1d42be73bac9594c5b1e.600x338

ynsta (Staney Marcel) is writing some code to make it run locally under Linux without the steam driver.  The github repo is here: https://github.com/ynsta/steamcontroller

I’ve forked it (https://github.com/ssilverm/steamcontroller) and I’m going to see if I can get it running as just a joypad for now.  It can currently run on the Raspberry Pi, and I can see the buttons being detected and get the feedback.  It’s just not being passed into a uinput item yet.  Soon 😀

Also, I’m trying to get the bootsplash to work again in Raspbian Jessie.  Jessie introduces Systemd, which takes over for init.d.  Currently the bootsplash runs later in the startup, so by the time omxplayer starts, the login screen is about a second away from showing up.  I’m working on that too.

Here’s my current steps:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/bootsplash.service

Insert this:

[Unit]
Description=BootSplash
DefaultDependencies=no
After=sysinit.target local-fs.target
Before=base.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/omxplayer /home/pi/PiPLAY.mov

[Install]
WantedBy=base.target

Then run:

sudo systemctl enable bootsplash.service

and reboot.

You should now get a bootsplash on startup, but it may be running to late.  I’m going to try and fix that.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Nov 06

Friday Post: Texas

Posted on by

Hey All,

Just got back from Austin, Texas for an educational conference.

The University of Texas at Austin is beautiful! Had a good conference, the LBJ Presidential Museum is on campus, so I was able to check that out. There is a really nice Makerspace located in the basement of the engineering building. Had a great feel. Blink-182 blasting in the background, students just working on stuff. 3 laser cutters and 14 Flashforge 3D printers available to use. Small mills in the back, vices on every table. Lots of room to work, lots of supplies to purchase. It’s great. Good Job UT.

I also got to visit two arcades! One is called Pinballz and true to the name, has about 40 pinball machines. Everything there was in great shape, and the video game selection was incredible. Got to play a Typing of the Dead, SF4, and SF X Tekken. They even had the non deluxe version of Star Wars BattlePods which was fun to try.

https://www.google.com/maps/@30.3700915,-97.7213994,3a,73.7y,223.57h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sWFQjGDbTKQ9D-VZ6GQTMmQ!2e0!3e2!7i13312!8i6656

I also went to ArcadeUFO, which was a small Japanese style arcade.  Lots of candy cabs, an interesting selection of games.  I really liked JuBeat.

Have a good weekend all!  Great to be back home 😀

-Shea

Oct 30

Friday Post: 100% Funded!

Posted on by

Hey All,

In just a short amount of time the Deskcade Kickstarter has been 100% funded!

This is awesome! Thank you all for your continued support. Here is some play testing I took at FamiLAB:

I have been told very last minute that I am going to Austin Texas next week to participate in a committee standard meeting, to help shape the next version of the Learning Tools Interoperability standard. I hate flying, so I’m nervous about the trip, but its only 2.5 hours. Just gotta try to sleep through the flight and I’ll be good. On the plus side, there are some INCREDIBLE arcades in Austin. Going to try to get Pinballz Arcade, and ArcadeUFO.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea