I know I’ve hit the big time. Someone called me a douche bag on the internet!
Jun
25
Jun
21
Friday Post: Telepresence Robots!
Hey All,
First off, no PiMAME this week. Still working out bugs. It’ll be soon I promise 🙂
I’m 99% done with my book. Content is all done!! Woo! Now I’m just working on the preface. I’m really excited to get back the edited version and do the final touches 😀 😀
Mike Dicillo created a really Arcade cabinet for PiMAME made entirely out of Lego. It is freaking awesome! http://www.mikedicillo.com/legocade/#
Onto the topic, my department got a cool new member this week. A telepresence robot! Specifically a Double Robotics unit.
It’s an iPad on a Segway, thats connected to the internet, and allows you to connect to it from anywhere in the world. It was awesome to test it out and attend a conference in another building. We had a coworker who is currently in another state connect to it and pilot it around the office.
We live in the future!
More PiMAME news soon 🙂
-Shea
Jun
14
Friday Post: Coming soon, PiMAME 0.8
Hey All,
What a hectic week. I’ve been working on the second half of my book, doing a ton of stuff at work, AND working on PiMAME 0.8 🙂
New features to come in PiMAME 0.8:
- gpiokey drivers
- dispmanx
- cavestory
- dgen (Genesis)
- advancemess (NES woo!)
I’m hoping to get it done this weekend, and I’ll let you all know when its up 🙂
Have a great weekend!
-Shea
Jun
07
Friday Post: Hardware
Hey All,
This week has been kinda awesome and frustrating at the same time. We had an issue crop up at work that dealt with some legacy app, and it was a part of the system no one had ventured in for a long time. Needless to say around 3pm today, after a whole week of digging around, we finally had a fix. Feels good!
I sent the first draft of the first half of my book to the publisher for editing and reviews. Feels real good!
My buddy Jacob received his Crazyflie nano quadcopter a few weeks ago and has been having a lot of fun with it. His latest project has been to control it via a Raspberry Pi. He has been flying it around the office and it’s a lot of fun to play with. The thing is whisper quiet until you start turning and then it sounds like a humming bird looking for a kill is coming at you. Again, its a lot of fun, especially with coworkers and nerf guns.
Another frustrating thing happened this week. I needed to take screenshots of the Raspberry Pi in action playing some games, so I did some research, and it looks liked the best device is an EasyCap DC60. This device takes input from an RCA jack and goes into your computer via USB, and appears like a webcam with the video. It also has Mac drivers, which is a big plus. Now I know there are a lot of fakes out there, and newer models which don’t support OS X, so I went on Amazon, looked for the proper model, and didn’t care that it was fulfilled by a third party. It was sent via prime and said DC60. What I got was a piece of counterfeit hardware.
Now, I buy a LOT of hardware from China. Over the years I have been very lucky about counterfeits. I tend to not order anything of enough importance to be counterfeited, or its generic enough that EVERYONE makes the same product. This time I wasn’t so lucky. I got an Easee Cap DC-60++ that used a utv007 chipset. This chipset BARELY supports Windows much less OS X or Linux. The software it came with was also pirated. I decided I was going to try to get it to work first though, and see if it had any saving grace.
It took two hours but it finally displayed my video in a window. I was so frustrated. If you can get your hands on a genuine EasyCap DC60, its supposedly an awesome video capture device. I’m still on the hunt for one.
Anyways, have a good weekend!
-Shea
Jun
03
Memory Sale
Amazon is having a massive sale on SanDisk memory today only. I’m picking up some SD Cards. Hope this is of value for some people.
-She
May
31
Friday Post: Writing is Exhausting!
Hey All,
Writing is exhausting, and tough, and mentally taxing. I love it, but wow, this is a new experience I don’t really have any updates for this week. I know Nick_Tones is anxiously awaiting more PiMAME stuff. I’m sorry I don’t have anything this week.
There was an askreddit thread earlier this week about what do people do with thier Raspberry Pi? There are some amazing projects in there. I really want to try doing a Raspberry Pi weather balloon launch with the University. I also posted PiMAME to the thread and I got an additional 1700 visits. That blew my mind.
I’m going to leave you with this, Patrick Stewart being awesome:
Have a good weekend!
-Shea
May
24
Friday Post: More Neat Things!
Hey all,
Another long week over here. I’m glad we have a 3 day weekend, because I could use it. Going to sleep until Monday I think 🙂 Anyways, onto the fun stuff!
Book
So, I’ve been waiting ages to announce this. I have been tapped by a publishing company to write a book about a computer that means a lot to me (hint hint). That’s really all the details I can announce at this time, but I’m very excited and eager to work on this project.
BarCamp Orlando
Last week I talked about BarCamp Orlando. It was a lot of fun. There were a lot of great talks given by members of the Orlando tech community. I met a lot of cool people, and networked with some fellow educators. It was also nice to see a big turnout of my coworkers and friends from FamiLAB show their support of this conference.
I did a talk about gaming on the Raspberry Pi, and I have to say it went fairly well. I have grown to really like public speaking, and I am very interested in doing more. I did about 15 minutes of explanations and demos of the Raspberry Pi’s capabilities, and another 10 minutes of QA from the audience members.
Thermal Imaged Pi
I received an email from Bux (from the forums) the other day. He acquired a thermal scanner, so he used it to take a picture of the Raspberry Pi.
Weston Accelerated X
A very exciting development in the continuing optimization of the Raspberry Pi has been released. A release of the Weston software that allows accelerated X windows to be displayed on the Raspberry Pi. This should help with the sluggish feeling that is encountered when using the GUI. I will be testing this out over the weekend. The instructions to install it are available here: http://fooishbar.org/tell-me-about/wayland-on-raspberry-pi/ and below:
echo deb http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy rpi >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install weston
Stickers
I think I have sent out all the stickers. If anyone hasn’t received theirs, please contact me again!
Have a great weekend everyone!
-Shea
May
17
Friday Post: Neat Things
Hey All,
It has been a long week. Star Trek Into Darkness was AMAZING! Go see it now. Stop reading. Go to your theater, watch it, then come back here and finish reading. It was that good.
SanderSiezen has made a really slick cocktail arcade cabinet, powered by PiMAME. His entire build log has been published at his site. I’m really impressed by the hinge used to hide the controls. Great Job!
BarCamp Orlando
BarCamp Orlando is this weekend. It’s basically a tech gathering un-conference. People meet up in a central area, sign up to do talks, speak about awesome things, and network, all while enjoying the bar scene around downtown.
I am hoping to do some talking about PiMAME and the Raspberry Pi.
Have a great weekend everyone!
-Shea
May
16
Raspberry Pi Camera Quick Look
Hey All,
I got my Raspberry Pi Camera board in the mail today! It was very easy to install. The hardest part was waiting for apt-get upgrade to complete. After that was done, a new camera option is available in raspi-config, and some new applications are available to run. The apps are raspivid and raspistill, which takes videos and photos respectively.
I haven’t spent a lot of time with the software, that’s for the weekend, but I did try taking some pictures via the command line. This is going to be an awesome add on!
-Shea
May
14
Cooling a Raspberry Pi with Liquid Nitrogen
Ok, this is seriously cool! (no pun intended)
The folks at linkxs.org decided to try running a Raspberry Pi under liquid nitrogen, and seeing how it performed. Like a beast apparently! It runs pretty stable at -100C. The ethernet port is only rated to 0C, so the fact that it still worked and they could stay SSHed into the machine is awesome.
Great job guys!
http://linkxs.org/freezing-a-raspberry-pi-in-liquid-nitrogen/
-Shea