Feb 21

3Doodler and Raspberry Pi On-Off Switch

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Hey All,

You all know I’m a huge Kickstarter fan.  This week has proved to be an awesome time for projects (and a sad day for my wallet).  Two projects caught my eye, the first one is the 3Doodler.

The 3Doodler is a hot-glue-gun like device that uses a plastic extruder to create 3D shapes in air.  The plastic extruder is one that you would normally see in a 3D printer like the Makerbot, but has been adapted to be handheld.  Because the plastic cools rapidly, it can create sturdy shapes that can be drawn anywhere.

It already surpassed the million dollar mark, so I have high hopes for this project.  I backed it at the $75 October level, so I hope to get mine then and be able to do a review of it.  If you are into 3D Printing and artwork, you may want to consider backing this project!

Another Kickstarter I backed this week is a project for the Raspberry Pi.  It’s an on/off switch that talks to the Pi via GPIO and activates a safe software shutdown before cutting power.

I’ve talked to the creator, he’s a member of the Raspberry Pi forums, and is quite excited about this project.  It’s $22 for this batch of boards.  If you are looking for a power switch for your Pi, this may be it.

I have a cool piece of hardware to show tomorrow.  Looking forward to sharing it with you all!

-Shea

Feb 16

Quick List of Raspberry Pi Disk Images

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Hey all,

A fellow Redditor ,  jfOIhe7Fl, has made a cool website which keeps track of pre-made Raspberry Pi Disk Images.

The site is available here: http://raspberrypidiskimages.com/ and the Reddit thread is here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/18n9w4/quick_list_of_raspberry_pi_disk_images/

There are some good ones in there, including PiMAME 😉

Hope you all enjoy it!

-Shea

Feb 15

Friday Post: Pebble

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Hey All,

I want to start this by saying I LOVE Kickstarter.  I have funded many projects, most have succeeded  some have been delayed, some are still in the will it succeed or will it fail phase.  I really like the Kickstarter model.  It’s not a store.  It’s a risk vs reward for the backers, and a way to make the creators dreams come true.  I plan on putting the DeskCade on Kickstarter very soon(tm).

Today I am going to talk about the Pebble Smartwatch.  I backed this many months ago, and it’s an ambitious project.  It was the first Kickstarter project to reach 10 million dollars.  I received my Pebble last Sunday, and I would like to write some initial thoughts on it.

TL;DR Cliffs Notes:  It’s got potential, with a firmware update it will be awesome, but it’s just not there yet.

My out of the box experience with the Pebble sucked.  I was using an iPhone 4S with iOS 5 because they said it was supported.  Well it isn’t 100% supported on iOS 5.  The app gets stuck trying to talk to the Pebble, and the firmware update that’s available hangs.  iOS 5 will send a notification when you get a call, but no notifications on texts or e-mail.

The next day I updated to iOS 6, and lo and behold, everything worked.  For about 2 hours.  When I sit down at my work desk, I usually take off my watch to code.  When I stepped away for a bit, nothing worked anymore.  I had to re sync the Bluetooth connection, turn off notifications and then re-enable them for it to work again.  And then I walked away again and it happened again.  It’s a frustrating issue that I know will be fixed in a firmware release.  It has too for this product to be successful.  I has to just work..

One other software gripe:  Please put a battery indicator and a charging indicator somewhere on the screen.

Onto the good:

The build quality is amazing!  Even though it’s only plastic, it feels solid and tough.  The screen is very easy to read.  The battery life so far has been great.  The charger has a very Apple Magsafe connector feel to it.  You place the charger on the side of the pebble and the magnets pull it into position.  As a watch, it’s great.

Conclusion:

This is going to be a great product.  I have no doubt.  Once they get the kinks out of it on the software side, I’m never going to take it off.  I’ve seen it work.  It has the potential to be a paradigm shift in wearable computers with it’s SDK.  I have high hopes for the creators.  I want to be able to back more of their ideas.

——————————-

On a side note, PiMAME 0.6 is in the works.  I’m hoping to release it next week.  Te latest edition of Raspbian came out last week.  I tried moving over to that, but it’s still slower than the older release of Raspbian I’m using.  It also seems to require a bigger SD card as it’s just hitting the 2GB limit.

I’m going to continue using the older Raspbian, I’m putting in a start-up menu so you can access frequently accessed items, and I’m working on making the image smaller so there aren’t as many issues with temperamental SD cards.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Shea

Feb 08

Friday Post: Warm Bodies and Instamorph

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!  I am going to spend most of tomorrow in bed.  I’m beat.  Grad School is great, but exhausting.  Working full time, school, and hobbies (plus my upcoming wedding) is insane.  And yet, I LOVE every second of it.

Warm Bodies

Tonight I had a well deserved date night with the fiancee.  We went and saw the movie Warm Bodies.  It’s a Zom-Rom-Com, like Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead.  I highly recommend it.

Instamorph

I forget where I saw this product initially, but once I started reading up on it, I had to have it.  Instamorph is mold-able  reusable, quick setting plastic.  The product comes as plastic pellets which you pour into just below boiling water.  When the plastic becomes clear, you can take it out and mold it into any shape you want.  As it cools, it hardens and turns white.

instamorphcat

Kristene made that in about 5 minutes.  I’m going to use it to make standoffs for my Raspberry Pi within the DeskCade.

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

 

 

Feb 07

PiMAME, AdvanceMAME, and AdvanceMENU Tankstick Configuration

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edit: Added dual stick configuration to advmame.rc

Hey all,

Here is a working config for the XGaming X-Arcade Tankstick!  The base of this comes from the very helpful site: http://www.raspberry.cat/20130203/pimame-i-x-arcade/

The first step is to edit /etc/rc.local and include this line before “exit 0”: Continue reading →

Feb 01

Friday Post: Nano Quadcopter

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Hey All,

Not much to write about this week.  Halfway through the Python for Kids book, will be writing a full review once I get through it all.  My graduate course is ramping up, but I’m still loving it.  Working out the kinks on the Tankstick, like the fact that when I tried to play SF2 with my fiancee, the second player buttons wouldn’t register in game…whoops!  Now onto the meat of the post!

If you have never been to Seeedstudio.com, you really should take a look.  They are an open hardware manufacturer   If you have an idea, and can make a prototype, they can probably mass produce it for you. They are currently selling preorders for a Nano Quadcopter.

At work, we have a couple of the $20 RC Helicopters that we play around with whenever we need to take a break.  We always wanted to get a quadcopter for the office, but most of the time, they are very expensive, too big, and not a full kit.  The size being the biggest factor.  This new quadcopter comes with everything you need, is open source, inexpensive, and best of all, fits in your hand!

One has already been ordered by my coworkers, and should arrive in April.  I’m excited to play with this thing (and hopefully not break a wing on my first attempt!)

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

Jan 30

Video of XArcade Stick Working with the Raspberry Pi

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Hey All,

Real quick, just wanted to show a very rough video of me using the XArcade Tankstick on the Raspberry Pi.  I have the Trackball, Buttons  and Joysticks all working.  Gridlee has issues with it (has to have custom inputs set) but Street Fighter 2 and Missile Command worked “out-of-the-box”.  I had to make a minor edit to the AdvanceMENU configuration file, but it looks like its working nicely.

I’m going to try a fresh re-install of PiMAME and try to recreate the results.  I’m hoping to have a guide for this very soon ™.

-Shea

Jan 27

PIP and Sheacob.com

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Hey All,

Today I’m pleased to introduce a partner site of mine. Sheacob.com is a collaborative blog between myself and my friend + coworker Jacob Bates.  Jacob is a coder, photographer, embedded electronics enthusiast, and an all around good guy.

We have been working together on some projects for the past year, and are finally making a place to debut them.  I hope you look forward to some of our creations.

With that said, here is something we made for the Raspberry Pi community (natch!):

PIP (http://pip.sheacob.com)

We got tired of having to hook up a screen to the Raspberry Pi, or go into our router, just to find out its IP address, so we decided to write this simple script. Basically, your Pi sends its local IP address to the site every time it boots, then you visit http://pip.sheacob.com site on your main computer to view it.

You can install it from our site or with this command:

wget http://pip.sheacob.com/pipinstall.py && chmod +x pipinstall.py && sudo ./pipinstall.py

We aren’t storing any personal information, it’s just the WAN address that your computer sends when you visit any website (like whatismyip.com) and the internal IP address of your Raspberry Pi.

Once installed, all you have to do is goto http://pip.sheacob.com to display the IP your Raspberry Pi has.

We hope you enjoy it and it helps out some people. Let us know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions!

-Shea Silverman & Jacob Bates

Jan 25

Friday Post: Little Boards

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Hey all,

I’ve been anxiously awaiting some voltage regulator boards I ordered from eBay for the past 2 weeks.  It seems they all came from China and all got here within a day or two of each other.  It’s kinda neat to see how each came packaged differently, through different mail systems, but yet all arrived safely on the other side of the planet.

Photo Jan 25, 9 41 31 PM

 

Photo Jan 25, 9 41 58 PM

 

My DigiSpark mini Arduino board came in as well.  This was a kickstarter based project from DigiStump that puts a whole Arduino with USB connector into a 1 square inch of space.

Photo Jan 25, 9 42 29 PM

It seems that the PiMAME 0.5 beta release is going well.  I advise everyone running it to expand the filesystem before uploading any games.  To do this, exit out of AdvMENU, then type sudo raspi-config on the command line.  Press enter and run the Expand Filesystem tool so you will have the usable space of your SD Card.  PiMAME was built to run on a 2GB SD Card, but only has 8MB of usable space be default.

Have a good weekend!

-Shea