Tag Archives: orlando

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

Apr 15

Arcades! Arcades! Arcades!

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Hey All,

This weekend is Star Wars Celebrations!  While I’m not able to go, for the past week I’ve been helping Free Play Florida finish their 10 foot Star Wars arcade cabinet for the convention.  This thing is awesome!  And MASSIVE!

This machine will be at Free Play Florida and Orlando Maker Faire this year 😀

SwitchCade

The Nintendo Switch has come out, and I have put a ton of hours into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild already.  This is one of my favorite consoles so far.  The eShop already has Neo Geo games and a new Street Fighter game is coming out ( Ultra Street Fighter II ) so of course I had to make a Nintendo Switch Arcade Machine 😀  The files to make your own are on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2235516/#files 

Have a great weekend all!

-Shea

Oct 10

Friday Post: Orlando iX 2015

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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.

IMG_5772 IMG_5839 (Large) IMG_5841 IMG_5837 IMG_5835 IMG_5831 IMG_5830 IMG_5829 IMG_5825 IMG_5822 IMG_5821 IMG_5820 IMG_5819 IMG_5818  IMG_5810 IMG_5813 IMG_5812 IMG_5807 IMG_5795 IMG_5794 IMG_5790 IMG_5788 IMG_5786 IMG_5781 IMG_5779 IMG_5778 IMG_5777 IMG_5776 IMG_5775 IMG_5774   IMG_5833 (Large)

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

Oct 02

Friday Post: Raspberry Pi Display and Orlando IX

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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.

2015-09-26   2015-09-27 (1) 2015-09-27

2015-09-30

2015-09-30 (1)

I’ve been working on some prototype cases for the display 🙂

Wish us luck, this weekend is going to be crazy!

-Shea

 

Sep 18

Friday Post: Maker Faire Orlando 2015 Was Awesome!

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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

Sep 11

Friday Post: Orlando Maker Faire is here!

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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!

IMG_5647.JPG-1 IMG_5648.JPG-1

 

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!

IMG_1827 playing_some_bubble_bobble__1024

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!

Aug 28

Friday Post: Cool Stuff for Maker Faire Orlando

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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!

facturworldsbiggest facturforscale

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:

2015-08-26 copy1/3 Model.  Cat for Scale.

IMG_5534 IMG_5533 IMG_5516 IMG_5514 IMG_5511Team working the ShopBot CNC Machine.

Also!

3D Printed a Bulbasaur using glow in the dark filament!

IMG_5543

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

 

 

 

Oct 04

Friday Post: EDUCAUSE

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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

 

Oct 12

Friday Post: Mini Cab in Orlando Sentinel

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Happy Friday Everyone!

I got an email this morning from the Orlando Sentinel that the interview with the Raspberry Pi foundation at FamiLAB was ready.  I have a small part in it, as you will see 🙂

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/videogallery/72853227/News/FLA360-Raspberry-Pi-Foundation-s-Eben-Upton

It has been an exciting two weeks, busy, but exciting.  I have not had time to work on emulation at the moment.  I have a long list of priorities to get done, but I’m working hard on things for the Raspberry Pi every day!

Also tonight I am going to see the Mythbusters Behind The Myths Tour! Should be a fun time.

Have a great weekend everyone!