Hey All!!!
The PiPlay team and I just launched our Deskcade Kickstarter!!!!
We only launched yesterday and are already over 70% of the way there!!!!
I hope you back it, and to those who have already you kick butt! THANK YOU!
-Shea
Hey All!!!
The PiPlay team and I just launched our Deskcade Kickstarter!!!!
I hope you back it, and to those who have already you kick butt! THANK YOU!
-Shea
Orlando iX was amazing. I was expecting nothing, and I got treated to an incredible 3 days of awesome tech heads talking shop and showing off their cool stuff. From cool indie games such as Battery Jam, to a storytelling “robot” plush named Trobo. The entire event was just filled with energy.
I had so much fun. And I took this whole week off. I spent most of this week just relaxing, sleeping, and playing a fan translated version of Mother 3. So good!
Have a good weekend all!
-Shea
Hey All,
Happy Friday!
This weekend is Orlando IX. It’s the first time this event is happening, and they are trying to make it like Orlando’s SXSW. Let’s see if they can pull it off. My coworkers are going to be there representing UCF, while me and some friends are going to be showing off PiPlay, and our custom arcade cabinets.
I recently got one of the Official Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Displays, and it is amazing. I love it. PiPlay looks great on it.
I’ve been working on some prototype cases for the display 🙂
Wish us luck, this weekend is going to be crazy!
-Shea
Hey All,
Maker Faire Orlando 2015 was amazing! It was awesome. So much fun was had by all. We set a new world record for the tallest arcade machine (playing Bubble Bobble). I am so proud of all my fellow makers that made the event a success!
You may have noticed an all black arcade cabinet and a game being played at our booth. A few friends and I are working on a classic shoot em up style game, and it is getting really good. Hopefully I’ll have more to say about that real soon ™.
Have a good weekend all!
-Shea
Hey All!
Orlando Maker Faire is here!!! If you are in Orlando, make your way to the Orlando Science Center and come see 300+ exhibits including PiPlay and our custom arcade machine!
Factur, FamiLAB, PiPlay, and Free Play Florida also have the worlds largest arcade machine being setup! It stands at 15 feet tall and plays Bubble Bobble!
The screen is 60″ and the buttons are 2.5″. This thing is a beast. More pictures to come!
I am exhausted from the push to get this all done today! Hope to see you there!
Hey All,
Maker Faire is in one week! Holy cow! Not enough time to get everything done!
We are on Make: again, this time talking about the quest to make the worlds largest arcade game!
My own exhibit will be about PiPlay and my own arcade cabinet that I’m building:
That’s all for this week!
Have a great weekend!
-Shea
Hey All,
First week of the semester is done! Can’t say everything went off without a hitch. Ran into a nasty timezone issue between servers that I just couldn’t figure out. One image, two servers cloned from that image. When pulling the info from Python one reported UTC, the other Eastern. Tried a bunch of different ways to force Eastern, but eventually used this:
from datetime import datetime from pytz import timezone fmt = "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S" # Current time in UTC now_utc = datetime.now(timezone('UTC')) print now_utc.strftime(fmt) # Convert to US/Eastern time zone now_eastern = now_utc.astimezone(timezone('US/Eastern')) print now_eastern.strftime(fmt)
So yeah, that was a fun couple days trying to make sure our data wasn’t 4 hours off 🙂 Also, we might be getting hit by a Tropical Storm / Hurricane on Monday. Yay.
Onto the cool stuff! Maker Faire Orlando!
I am working on two projects for Maker Faire. The first is with Factur and FamiLAB. We are making the worlds LARGEST arcade cabinet! It is so awesome. I can’t wait for the electronics to come in so I can help wire it up. I’ll be posting more details as we get closer to the Faire!
The top panel was recently added on, but I couldn’t get a good picture of it because it is about an inch from touching the ceiling of the warehouse, and I just couldn’t get a good angle on it. This thing is massive! It’s a beast!
My personal project is a new modular arcade cabinet.
This is a 3 piece cabinet that breaks down into sections for easy movement, transporation, and customization. My main requirement was that it had to fit in my PT Cruiser, everything from there was negotiable. This is what it looks like so far:
Team working the ShopBot CNC Machine.
Also!
3D Printed a Bulbasaur using glow in the dark filament!
Have a good weekend all!
-Shea
Hey All,
Sorry for not posting last weekend. I needed a break. I have been super swamped these past two weeks. Fall semester begins on Monday, and for some reason, this feels like a weird one. Something is in the air. My team is launching a new app for teachers and students. It’s coming out of pilot phase after a year. I’m so excited and nervous!
Of course things didn’t roll out as they were supposed to. Network errors, department ticket freezes, ubuntu issues…everything but the software has been blowing up around me. Though this means on Monday, everything will work A-Ok!. If everything went smoothly, I would really be worried 😀
Next week, once I hopefully have some time to breathe, I will have some big things to post about.
Have a great weekend, and a great start of classes to my fellow friends in Academia!
-Shea
Hey All,
Now that Hack Day at the office is out of the way, I would like to post about what I learned and some examples to get you started. The following is some example code and an introduction to iBeacons.
Setting up a Raspberry Pi to be an iBeacon
Longer guide available here: Adafruit PiBeacon
On a fresh install of Raspbian, login to the terminal and type:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libusb-dev libdbus-1-dev libglib2.0-dev libudev-dev libical-dev libreadline-dev
Next we want to download, build, and install BlueZ, a bluetooth stack for Linux and the Raspberry Pi.
sudo mkdir bluez cd bluez sudo wget www.kernel.org/pub/linux/bluetooth/bluez-5.11.tar.xz tar xf bluez-5.11.tar.xz cd bluez-5.11 ./configure --disable-systemd make sudo make install
Now that BlueZ is installed, plug in your Bluetooth Adapter and reboot your Pi with:
sudo reboot
When it is finished rebooting, log back in and go into the bluez folder by typing:
cd bluez/bluez-5.11
Check that your bluetooth device is listed by running:
tools/hciconfig
You should see a few lines appear about hci0 and that it is currently down.
Issue these commands to bring up your bluetooth device:
sudo tools/hciconfig hci0 up sudo tools/hciconfig hci0 leadv 3 sudo tools/hciconfig hci0 noscan
Now we are going to turn the device into an iBeacon.
sudo tools/hcitool -i hci0 cmd 0x08 0x0008 1E 02 01 1A 1A FF 4C 00 02 15 E2 0A 39 F4 73 F5 4B C4 A1 2F 17 D1 AD 07 A9 61 01 00 00 01 C8 00
The long set of character E2 0A 39 F4 73 F5 4B C4 A1 2F 17 D1 AD 07 A9 61 is actually the iBeacon’s ID.
The next four numbers: 01 00 are the major id and show up as 100.
The next four numbers 00 01 are the minor number and show up as just 1.
You don’t have to worry about the numbers before E2 and after the minor value 00 01.
You can set the major and minor to anything from 0 to 9999. This is how you will be able to tell apart different beacons in your app. The app is currently set to recognize Major 100 Minor 1 and Major 100 Minor 2.
If you change these numbers on your device, make sure to update the app.js code as explained below.
If you reboot your Pi, you will find that the bluetooth device has been reset and that it is no longer functioning as an iBeacon.
To fix this we are going to edit /etc/rc.local.
sudo nano /etc/rc.local
You will want to place the following code above the exit 0 at the end of the file.
sudo /home/pi/bluez/bluez-5.11/tools/hciconfig hci0 up sudo /home/pi/bluez/bluez-5.11/tools/hciconfig hci0 leadv 3 sudo /home/pi/bluez/bluez-5.11/tools/hciconfig hci0 noscan sudo /home/pi/bluez/bluez-5.11/tools/hcitool -i hci0 cmd 0x08 0x0008 1E 02 01 1A 1A FF 4C 00 02 15 E2 0A 39 F4 73 F5 4B C4 A1 2F 17 D1 AD 07 A9 61 01 00 00 01 C8 00
Press ctrl-x then y to save and quit.
Now reboot your Raspberry Pi and it should become an iBeacon on startup.
Application Side
We are now going to create the iBeacon app. The instructions below are to do this on a Mac with XCode, PhoneGap, and an iOS device with a developer subscription. You can also do this on Android with Linux, OS X, or Windows, the Android SDK, and PhoneGap.
First, you want to install cordova. On a Mac or Linux machine use:
npm install -g cordova
(If you don’t have NPM on a Mac install the amazing tool Homebrew and then install node.js)
Then create your app directory:
cordova create beacon com.yourname.beacon beacon cd beacon cordova platforms add ios
(for android do cordova platforms add android, but make sure the android sdk is installed)
Add some basic plugins:
cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.device cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.console
and the ibeacon plugin:
cordova plugin add https://github.com/petermetz/cordova-plugin-ibeacon.git
Now lets rename the www folder in the folder. We don’t need it, it’s the default phonegap application, but it could be a useful example later.
mv www www.example
Now let’s clone the ibeacon example!
git clone https://www.github.com/ssilverm/ibeacon-www www
Edit lines 7 – 23 of app.js to match the ID, Major, and Minor of your beacons. They will trigger the page changes on your device.
app.beaconRegions = [ { id: 'Page1', uuid:'E20A39F4-73F5-4BC4-A12F-17D1AD07A961', major: 100, minor: 1 }, { id: 'Page2', uuid:'E20A39F4-73F5-4BC4-A12F-17D1AD07A961', major: 100, minor: 2 }, ]
You can see how the above code is set to the same as the iBeacon we set up above, as well as another beacon with the minor value set to 2.
The next steps are how to build your iBeacon app for an ios device like an iPhone or iPad. I don’t have an Android device, but as long as you have the Android sdk the functions should be the same. Change ios for android.
When you have finished editing app.js, save it and then type:
cordova build ios
After a few minutes your terminal should read Build Succeeded.
Open the platforms/ios folder and double click on the beacon.xcodeproj file to launch XCode. With your device connected you should be able to run your app on the device.
Make sure location services are enabled for the app.
Now go walk around to where you set up the beacons and the pages should automatically change as you get closer to them. It will also revert to the main page as you move out of range.
I hope this has been helpful!
Have a great weekend all!
-Shea
GitHub Code: https://github.com/ssilverm/ibeacon-www
Hey All,
So for the past month I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out the issue where PiPlay says Could not check for updates. I KNEW it was because of my server move but I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t reproduce it on my end. I really thought that it was because the requests module coudln’t do redirects. Tonight I was dealing with a PiPlay issue with a cool teacher in Canada who is making games with her students, and we were troubleshooting a bad wifi card. We got everything working, and then the can’t connect to piplay server message came up, and I was going to admit defeat, but I then saw it was going to WWW.pimame.org. I had set up www on piplay.org, but I had never setup the WWW redirect on the old domain. I feel dumb. One DNS change and a 5 minute propagation and everything is working now.
On a side note, I designed this warp pipe planter in OpenSCAD, and printed it out today. I drove out to a local nursery and picked up some venus fly traps, and voila! One Super Mario Bros. “Piranha Plant” in my own home 😀
You can download the STL file at thingiverse, and it will be up on my Etsy as well.