Tag Archives: pi

Mar 14

Pi Day Giveaway!

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Hey All!

Happy Pi Day!

For Pi Day, I am going to be giving away TWO things.  A Raspberry Pi 3, and a PiPlay Portable kit.

All you have to do to enter is enter your email address in the form below.  I will be closing the submission at the end of the week!  Look for the PiPlay Portable Kickstarter this month!

-Shea

Jan 09

(Late) Friday Post: and the winner is! Also Monoprice Maker Architect 3D Printer

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Hey All!

The winner of the Raspberry Pi Zero giveaway is Aaron!  Congratulations!  I will be emailing you later tonight!

Onto other news.  This has been a hell of a week.  Had a small health scare with my grandmother, so we drove 200 miles yesterday to visit her.  We spent the night and drove back home today.  Hence the late post.  Shes doing better, so phew! 😀

This week I implemented a cool video encoding queuing system using Redis and Django.  The module I used is called Django-RQ, and it makes it super simple to convert your functions into queue-able objects using the @Job decorator.

This Tuesday is my birthday! Woo!  I turn 32.  I’m content.  I also start classes that night.  Yay lol.  I bought this as a gift for myself:

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It’s a Monoprice Maker Architect 3D Printer for $300.  It’s a major upgrade compared to my Micro, but it takes a lot more to get it going.  I’ve had it for two days and I’ve finally got most of the settings dialed in.

When I went to visit my Grandma I took along my Kinect sensor and used Skanect to scan her, so I was able to quickly print out a very low poly version of her as a bust.

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The Skanect free version limits exports to only 5000 polygons.  Once I upgrade I can export at full resolution.

Have a good week / weekend all.

Thanks for reading.  I really appreciate it.

-Shea

Dec 05

Friday Post: TGIF

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Hey All,

TGIF!  Thank goodness it’s Friday.  This has been a trying week.

For the bad: I had a little food poisoning, had a small car issue, and dealt with an anxiety attack of epic proportions (hooray for an understanding doctor’s office / doctor.)

For the good: Got most of the kickstarter parts in.  Found a really cool edge case in a program we developed at work, and was able to fix it!  Also pushed a large project out to AWS for work and it worked.  The more I use AWS for large scale applications the more I love it.  Still afraid of vendor lock in for my personal projects though.

AND I got my Raspberry Pi Zero in!

This little guy is cool!

IMG_20151203_205459840 IMG_20151203_205532614 IMG_20151205_245916656 IMG_20151205_245926609 IMG_20151205_245937360 IMG_20151205_245957094

 

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Feb 22

Friday Post: Baked Raspberry Pi

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Full Disclosure: Seeed Studio sent me the Wireless Charging Module for free because I entered their reviewer contest.

Hey All,

So I said I had some cool hardware to show off today, and here it is: Seeed Studio’s Wireless Charging Module

photo (1)

This kit uses inductive charging to transfer power “wirelessly” from one coil to the other.  You put in 12v 1A on the transmitter end, and on the other end you get 5v 0.6A.

I initially had some trouble getting it setup.  I was trying connectors in every different position, every combination I could think of.  It took me a day to realize my power supply was set to 9v rather than 12v.  Once I upped the voltage, I could hold the coils an inch away from each other and still keep a charge.  I also tried putting things in between the coils to see how much interference it could take.  It had no problems with a coupon book, business cards, a small plastic mint case, though it did have issues being between a remote.

Now, me being me, I had to try this with the Raspberry Pi, and I knew I had to do something special.  My coworker Mike has been fiddling with bare metal assembly on the Pi, and has ported NyanCat to the system.  His github repo with the source assembly code and pre built binary is available here.

By connecting the receiver coil to the 5v and GND GPIO pins, I was able to wirelessly power the Pi.

I hope you enjoy!

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

—-

PiMAME 0.6 should be out this weekend 😀

Jan 23

PiMAME 0.5 Beta Release

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Hey all,

This is just for testing purposes, but if you like to live on the cutting edge, I’m making available the beta/pre-release/testing release of PiMAME 0.5!

It’s based off the PiMAME 0.3 image, with the Uploader file size limit set to 200MB, and the Snapshot artwork in AdvMENU.

Let me know if you have any issues with it!

-Shea

Jan 22

X-Arcade Tankstick Unboxing

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Hey all,

My new Tankstick arrived today, courtesy of XGaming.com. They have asked me to test it and get it running on the Raspberry Pi. I only had a couple minutes to play with it, but I made a little unboxing video for everyone:

Size comparison of the Pi versus a Tankstick:

tankstick
This thing has some heft to it!  With the few minutes I got to use it, I notice why some users of the Raspberry Pi are having difficulties making it work right.  It’s nothing wrong with the device, but with the way some of the software interprets the inputs.  I have a couple of hunches and ideas on how to fix it, which I hope to get to within the next week.

PiMAME 0.5 is also coming along nicely.  I’m reverting back to the 0.3 stack and just adding some minor modifications.  That should be released on Friday.

-Shea

Jan 06

Pleasant Surprise, New version of AdvanceMAME was released

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Hey All,

I received a pleasant surprise this weekend.  A new version of AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU was released by the author.  I am currently compiling it and testing it out.  It is still based on MAME 0.106.

This is going to push back the PiMAME 0.4 release as I want to incorporate these new binaries into it.

You can find the sources here: http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/index.html

Jan 04

Friday Post: First post of 2013!

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Hey all,

Happy New Year!  Welcome to 2013 🙂

On Monday Element14 will have more Raspberry Pi’s in stock.  Get your credit cards ready.  I will also be taking my first graduate course that same day.  I am very happy and looking forward to working on my masters degree.

I now have a USB gamepad and I’m going to work on getting that setup.  I’m currently working on PiMAME 0.4 and hope to have it released this weekend.  I am incorporating as many fixes and improvements as I can.  I really appreciate your feedback.

In other Pi news, teh_orph has posted new information about his XWindows accelerated drivers for the Pi.  I am looking forward to trying them out.  They are FAR from finished, but this is a great step forward.

Have a great weekend!

-Shea