Tag Archives: piplay

Mar 18

Friday Post: Cool Stuff

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Hey All,

Got some cool stuff to post!

First off, got my Pi3 and have pics to show.

IMG_20160305_123135035_HDR IMG_20160305_123142557_HDR IMG_20160305_123151811_HDR IMG_20160305_123201893 IMG_20160305_123221663 IMG_20160305_123230360 IMG_20160305_123255506 IMG_20160305_123303098 IMG_20160305_123338411Love this device so much!

BUT, what I’m more excited to show off is a very early prototype of a project a coworker and I are working on!

12722257_10104959026967052_78897063_oIt’s a Raspberry Pi Zero powered portable gaming system styled after the Nintendo GameBoy Advance using an SPI TFT and some other little cool things.

This is the first PCB I’ve ever helped design, and I placed the order for it this week.  Boards shipped today, which means they will get here between 8 and 40 days.  Argh, the waiting sucks!

On another note, Pokken Tournament came out today for the Wii U.  It’s a really cool Tekken inspired Pokemon fighting game and so far I am loving it!  My Nintendo Network ID is SSilver2k2 so if you want to fight, add me 😀

I also picked up some really cool Nintendo retro consoles this week.

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This is the Sharp Famicom Twin.  It is the Japanese version of the NES (Famicom) and the Famicom Disk System combined into one unit.  I also picked up the Family BASIC addon which allows you to do rudimentary programs in BASIC (HuBASIC) for the NES.  BASIC programs can be saved and loaded off of a cassette tape player, or loaded from any audio player.

Have a good 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

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

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

-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!

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Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

 

 

 

Aug 01

Friday Post: Forgetting to set DNS

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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 😀

11807716_10104381579905592_3981371305566672176_oYou can download the STL file at thingiverse, and it will be up on my Etsy as well.

 

Jul 10

Friday Post: Make Magazine!

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!

This week just flew by, but projects are going really well, and I am hoping to have a cool announcement in the next week or so.  In the meantime…

PiPlay was featured in Make Magazine!!!!!!!

I’m seriously fanboying over here.  To have my project featured in Make is like having a researcher’s paper featured in Science or Nature magazine.  I’m just blown away.

The article is about making a home arcade system and controlling the games with an Arduino Esplora.

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Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

 

Jun 26

Friday Post: Working Working Working

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Hey All,

I feel like I have a ton on my plate and nothing to show….yet.  Working on PiPlay, our new remote controller system, an arcade game for Orlando IX, and an arcade machine for Maker Faire Orlando.  It’s going to be a rough couple of months 🙂

This weekend is Community Effort Orlando, an annual fighting game tournament held near the attractions.  I’ve never been to CEO, but I’m really looking forward to it.  Street Fighter V is going to be playable, as well as Tekken 7.  I’m also going to be able to play a lot of arcade games 😀

Have a good weekend!

-Shea

May 29

Friday Post: BeagleBone Splatoon

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!

Today Nintendo released a whole bunch of new Amiibos that were highly sought after.  I was in line at WalMart at midnight and had a lot of fun.  Met a bunch of cool people in line.  We were laughing and comparing game collections, and then the electronics guy comes out and tell us there are 6 Amiibo.  Not 6 of the 9 characters.  Just 6 Amiibo total.  3 Pac-Man and 3 Charizard.  I was 7th in line.  We could only laugh at the ridiculousness.  On the plus side, I picked up Splatoon! It is just as amazing as the demo!  If you have a Wii U and like FPS / 3PS this is a must.

The only Amiibo I was after was the Silver Mario.  I mean, come on, Silverman, Silver Mario.  It was a must buy.  There was no line at my GameStop so I was able to get one without a problem, it was just that was all they had.  This whole product line is crazy.  People going crazy over little figures.  Gotta catch em all!

In other news,  I picked up a Beagle Bone Black and I am working on testing PiPlay on that.  Initial tests look good.  It runs Ubuntu, and has some quirks, but I was able to get Mednafen, CaveStory, and DGen working without issue.

Look for more updates regarding that soon!

Have a good weekend all.

-Shea

May 22

Friday Post: Happy 90th Birthday Grandma!

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Hey All,

First off, Happy 90th Birthday to my Grandma B!!  Love ya!

It’s been a hectic few weeks.  The migration has gone pretty well.  I have some more stuff to move over, but I’m happy with it.  The server is so powerful.

Mark and I are going to be bringing up a new service for gamebox art soon to help with PiPlay.  I have also been hard at work on some electronics stuff, and Mark has been doing some cool coding.

I’m really looking forward to the next month.  I have been pulled in a lot of directions, took a few breaks, but I think I’m finding the right thing to move forward with.

I can’t wait for the next part of this ride.

Have a good weekend everyone!

-Shea