Tag Archives: adafruit

Dec 31

2018

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Hey All,

I almost didn’t blog for the whole year. To be truthful, it’s been hard to write this past year. Lots of amazing wonderful things have happened to me in 2018, but I’m exhausted. And this blog was easy to overlook. I want to write again, but at my own pace. I’m going to try to start again.

That said…. BEING A FATHER IS AWESOME! I have an amazing little mini me who is 20 months old and is just so much fun. He has made me grow in ways I never even knew imaginable.

Maker Faire Orlando 2018

My friend Jacob and I worked on an awesome project for Maker Faire Orlando this year, and I am so proud to say we won Maker of Merit! It is a deep honor to me to win that award. And of course it’s Raspberry Pi related 😀

We made a 4096 LED pixel framebuffer display powered by the Raspberry Pi!

LED Display playing a clone of Snake
Prototype at the Orlando Science Center

How it works?

We are using P10 LED panels as the basis for the screen. P10 means a 10mm dot pitch, so 10mm between each LED. They range from 3 – 10mm. The panels also usually come in a size of 16 x 32, but luckily they are daisy chainable!

The Raspberry Pi can even handle upto 32 of them in 3 chains! For our purposes we only used 8 16×32 panels in one chain.

8 P10 Panels, daisychained to an Adafruit LED matrix bonnet, connected to a Raspberry Pi 3b+, with power distributed via a CFOL Distro 8 board.

The above picture may look complicated, but it’s not that bad.

8 P10 panels are daisy chained together using a standard HUB75 cable (it’s like an smaller IDE cable).

The panels are mounted together with the orange and red 3D printed brackets.

The first panel is connected to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ via an Adafruit LED matrix bonnet.

The power for the panels and the Pi comes from a 10amp DC supply, which plugs into the bonnet. The bonnet powers the Pi, and has two screw terminals for the voltage output. The +/- screw terminals connect to a CFOL Distro 8 PCB (in the center of the board) which takes the input and breaks it out to 8 screw terminals. We only need 4 since each cable powers two panels, but it gives us room to expand.

After that we use https://github.com/adafruit/rpi-fb-matrix to copy whats on the HDMI framebuffer out onto the LED matrix!

and Voila! You now have a giant low resolution display!

Many thanks to Adafruit for making such a great beginner tutorial that we could jump from, and building a great bonnet for the Pi!

Happy Making and a Happy New Year! Here’s to a wonderful 2019 everyone!

-Shea

Jul 04

Friday Post: 4th Of July

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Hey All,

To my fellow Americans, Happy Independence Day.  To everyone else, Happy 4th of July, because Friday’s are awesome!

PiPlay 0.8 Beta 4 is 99.9% done.  I am doing some final testing, and it will be uploaded this weekend!!  I’m excited and can’t wait for everyone to try it out.

Laser cutters are cool!

2014-07-02 2014-07-03 (1) 2014-07-03These are photos of the aftermath of creating 15 PiPlay cases.  I love laser cutters!

Raspiado

A fellow redditor has started a kickstarter for a USB hub that attaches directly to the Pi.

It looks neat, and I’m going to back this.

Adafruit 3D Printed Raspberry Pi Gameboy

Adafruit is awesome, and this is even awesomer.

Have a great weekend everyone!  I’ll update / make a new post when the new PiPlay image is uploaded.

-Shea

Jan 17

Friday Post: January

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Hey All,

It is the middle of January and it already feels like a year full of events has occurred.  I turned 30.  It’s a weird feeling not being in my twenties anymore.  It will take some getting used too.  I spent my birthday with good friends.

My new computer has been built and is running beautifully.  Had to return the old PSU because one of the fan blades cracked, which was causing it to overheat.  Picked up a Corsair modular PSU and it’s been running 24×7 with no issues.

2014-01-12

PiMAME was featured in the January / February issue of Raspberry Pi Geek.  It was given a 2 page spread, as well as reviews of other gaming environments for the Pi.

RPG_UK_02-2013

 

PyCon 2014

I was notified that I was chosen to give a poster session at this years Python programming conference, PyCon, in Montreal.  I am very excited to be showing off the work I have done with Python and the Raspberry Pi.  It’s going to be April 9th through the 11th.  The past two conferences have been amazing, and I am excited to be able to have more of a role this year. More information is available at us.pycon.org

Adafruit

Back in 2012 I hacked together a crude but effective USB power cord with a switch.  Adafruit is now selling a professionally manufactured cable that does the same thing for only $2.95.

Mine:Photo Jul 22, 4 13 45 PM

Adafruits:1620_MED

 

I’m so glad this cable has finally been made.  It was a pain to hand make them!

Have a great weekend all!  PiMAME news next weekend 😀

 

-Shea

 

Nov 29

Friday Post: Joystick debugging

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Hey All,

This has been a fun week.  K and I have finished painting the house, we’ve been slowly bringing things in.  All the fun joys of moving to a new place 🙂

This week I’ve been making progress with Joystick support in PiMAME.  I’m hoping for 0.8 to have full joystick support implemented and an easy to use system to configure it.

Remember Cyber Monday deals this coming monday!  SparkFun and Adafruit are having some great sales.

-Shea

Sep 22

Friday Post: Adafruit and Black Mesa

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Hey all,

It’s been a fun week.  I have been playing a LOT of Black Mesa on Steam.  If you have never played Half Life then I recommend you pick up this great fan remake of the original game.  If you HAVE played Half Life then you need to play this game and see how great it is.  It’s free.  It’s awesome.  It’s a lot of fun.  http://release.blackmesasource.com/

Today Adafruit linked to me again.  This time about my Battery Powered Pi and how I was using their 2″ screen.  That made my day 🙂  The screen is working out great!

On the news about the overclocking…Holy Crap does it make a difference!  Street Fighter 2 is now 100% playable, and i’ve been able to load D&D (a CPS2 game) and it play amazingly.  I’ll be getting some video of that up soon.  If you are using Raspbian, update and upgrade to the latest version.  It’s worth it.

Have a great weekend!

Aug 10

Friday Post: Descent and photography

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Hey all,

Another Friday post here.  A couple of days ago Derhass made a post about getting Descent 1 and 2 ported to the Raspberry Pi with OpenGL ES.  Descent was an amazing game released back in the early 1990’s.  It had true 6 range freedom of movement in a spaceship with 3D modeling.   An amazing game at the time, and one that I could NEVER beat.  I’m in the middle of writing a tutorial on how to patch and compile the game, as well as hosting the binaries themselves.

Today on the Raspberry Pi frontpage is a really cool piece on time lapse photography titled “Painting with light (and a Raspberry Pi)”.  The images are really fantastic:

Time lapse photography

Hope everyone has a good weekend.  I’ll be writing the tutorial up this weekend and should have it posted soon.  Thanks for the view!

-Shea

 

Aug 06

Youtube in my Raspberry Pi? or Is that an LCD in your pocket or are you just happy to see me…

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LCD Screen

This weekend has been fun.  I got my 2.0″ LCD Display from Adafruit in!  It’s an amazing little screen.  Bright, Sharp, Colorful.  MAME, Quake, NeoGeo games all look great on it.  A concern I had was how to power the little screen.  It can take 5v – 12v, and the connector is just two bare wires for power.

After testing the screen with a regular power supply, I decided I wanted to see if I could power it via the GPIO power pins on the Raspberry Pi itself.  I was concerned about the amperage it would require, but after connecting it to pins 2 and 6 (5v and GND), and powering on the Pi, they both turned on and I was watching Raspbian bootup.

Youtube

On the Raspberry Pi Forums, gcala contributed a post with a how to on getting Youtube to play from the command line to omxplayer.

Here is a video I took after getting youtube-viewer running on my Pi:

Hope you all enjoy this!

-Shea

Aug 03

Friday Post: Woo! Long week…

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Hey all,

This has been an interesting long week.  I’m really happy with the feedback I’ve recieved regarding the Raspbian binaries I released.  I got linked to by Adafruit which is awesome!  I purchased one of thier little 2.0″ LCD TVs.  Still waiting for it to arrive, but I plan to do some fun things with that small screen and the Raspberry Pi.  Bensoutlet.com has on sale the Motorola Lapdock for $59.99 which is a really good price.  Theres a 14 page forum post about how people are using it to make Raspberry Pi laptops.

My next goal is to write up some tips and tricks for the emulators that my commentors have posted, and still working on getting Love2D to work.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

-Shea