Hey All,
Figured I would post a list of items that I feel would be awesome purchases for anyone with an electronics itch to scratch!
Holiday 2014
Dec
10
Dec
03
Encade Portable Raspberry Pi Gaming Console Kickstarter
Hey All,
Just wanted to post a cool Kickstarter that I’m backing. The people at Nzen Mods are designing a really cool Raspberry Pi based project.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2032055368/the-encade-a-portable-raspberry-pi-gaming-console
It’s a portable Raspberry Pi based gaming console. They are so close to hitting their goal, and only have 22 hours left.
Enjoy!
-Shea
Nov
28
Friday Post: Happy Thanksgiving!
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
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
Oct
31
Friday Post: Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween Everyone!
Love my coworkers. We do enjoy our office Halloween shenanigans.
At the Orlando Maker Faire I had gotten myself scanned for a 3D statue. This week it arrived. I present, Mini Me!
That’s it for this week folks. Not a whole lot going on. Sorry!
-Shea
Oct
24
Friday Post: PiPlay 0.8 Beta 7
Hey All,
Sorry about the lack of posts last week, dealing with family stuff.
I am excited to formally announce the release of PiPlay 0.8 Beta 7!
- 0.8.0 Beta 7
- Added changelog popup
- Themes now support background music (uncompressed preferred)
- Fixed problems with semi-transparent labels
- 2 player controller config support added
- Controller Config list sorted
- Now using gunicorn for web frontend.
Get it now by by downloading the image or updating your current version with the PiPlay updater.
Have a great weekend!
-Shea
Oct
10
Friday Post: Custom Carts
Hey All,
Happy Friday! This week I got in two cartridges that I am very to share with you all. The first one is a custom SNES cart called StarFox Legacy!
StarFox Legacy contains three games:
- The original StarFox
- The StarFox competition game (a modified version that has a timer set and you have to rack up the most points before it runs out)
- The unreleased StarFox 2.
To change games, you hold the reset switch down for 3 seconds. It’s a really cart, and I’m glad I was able to acquire it.
The second cart is made for the Sega Genesis, and is a homebrew game some of you may know called FIX IT FELIX JR!!! Yes, someone programmed a recreation of the game from the movie Wreck It Ralph! It’s really well done, the label looks awesome, and I love it.
PiPlay 0.8 Beta 7 is coming!
Nothing too groundbreaking in this one. Bug fixes for the controller setup, a popup window on first startup to give you some hints as well as a change log popup. Some bug fixes, a little bit of speed improvements, background sounds. I’m also switching out the python flask built in webserver for gunicorn. It causes great speed improvements, uses less RAM and CPU. When I switched to it, I noticed a lot of SNES games stopped stuttering.
I’ll be uploading the image this weekend and the updater should be available shortly.
-Shea
Oct
04
Friday Post: EDUCAUSE
Hey All,
This week I was at the EDUCAUSE educational conference which took place locally in Orlando. I was speaking on my work with the LTI standard and the applications I have created for UCF. My first talk was amazing. It went as perfect as a presentation could go. My second talk though….it was my first time doing a moderated panel session. It was awesome. I loved it….until the fire alarm went off mid sentence and the entire convention center started to evacuate!
I also got some coverage on the IMS Global blog (they are the ones who created the LTI standard): http://www.imsglobal.org/blog/?p=372
All in all, its been a great week, but I haven’t been this exhausted since PyCon.
On the PiPlay side, we are getting some bug reports in, and working on squashing a bunch of them. The updater has been re-factored to now take into account version numbers, so you shouldn’t have to wait as long for updates.
The latest version of Raspbian with the new Epiphany browser is amazing. It makes using the web on a Pi a decent experience, and not a chore like before.
You should try it out.
Have a good weekend all!
-Shea