Hey All,
The wedding was awesome. I’m officially married! We just got back from our week long honeymoon. We cruised the caribbean. It was beautiful. I have some great pictures to upload later.
I just launched pimame.org . It’s the official site for PiMAME, as well as the PiMAME Forums.
Enjoy everyone!
-Shea
Hey All,
PiMAME 0.6 Beta 3 is now available.
This is primarily a test to see if those who were affected by the booting issues has been resolved. This is an image with updated firmware.
Please let me know if this works or doesn’t. Thanks!
-Shea
I think I have figured out the booting issues. PiMAME 0.6 Beta 3 will be uploaded today.
Thanks for the feedback!
-Shea
Hey All,
I’ve put my PiMAME code and configurations on GitHub for anyone to look at, check out, fork, make improvements, etc, etc.
If you check out menu.py, you will see that I have a new line item for RetroPie / EmulationStation.
I am testing it out in addition to AdvanceMAME.
Enjoy!
https://github.com/ssilverm/PiMAME
-Shea
Hey All,
What a week. I’ve been working on a presentation for the University, finally showed it off, got a ton of good jobs and awesome work. Feels like a weight was lifted. I don’t know if we will move forward with the idea, but it’s been fun so far.
Next week I will be at PyCon in California. I went last year and it was amazing, and this year’s talks look great. I’m excited.
I’ve gotten tons of feedback about PiMAME 0.6b2, and I feel like it’s going in a great direction. If it wasn’t for all you giving me tons of feedback, this project wouldn’t be even 10% as good. Thank you.
On an exciting note, a book I have been a technical editor/reviewer on has made it to the printers and is available to buy at Amazon. It’s called the “Raspberry Pi Networking Cookbook”. It’s really humbling to have my name in print, and I honestly wouldn’t have been given these opportunities without everyone’s support. That’s why my part of the dedication is to the community. Here’s to you!
The FIRST Robotics regional competition in Orlando has been going on this week. I was a member of Team 108 (Go SigmaC@TS!) back in high school. FIRST is what really pushed me into the field I’m in now, and it’s always an awesome sight seeing hundreds of students working on robots, getting excited about competition, but most importantly, making friends with others from around the world. It’s not about winning, it’s about working together.
So wooo! So glad it’s the weekend. Time to sleep until Monday!
-Shea
Hey All,
Thanks for the heads up on some of the issues. PiMAME 0.6 Beta 2 is now available. Please let me know how it works out for you!!!
-Shea
Beta2 is now up!
You guys rock! I know about the slowness. Working on a Beta2 right now!
Sorry for the late post, I have been waiting on the new image to upload to my web host.
Hey All!
Today is the 1 year anniversary of the Raspberry Pi’s launch. I’m really proud of the community and environment that has sprung up surrounding this wonderful device.
I am very happy to be releasing a beta for PiMAME 0.6.
Release Notes:
I realize this isn’t a monumental release, but it’s a leap forward on the foundation. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of improvements I want to include. As I make these improvements, I’m going to release more and more. You all have been awesome at pointing me in the direction you wish PiMAME to go. Thank you! I’m eager to hear your feedback on this version.
-Shea
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
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
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PiMAME 0.6 should be out this weekend 😀
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
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