Tag Archives: raspberry

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

Dec 18

PiMAME quick fixes and information

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Hey all,

I’ve been getting tons of feedback about PiMAME.  Thank you for all the comments and suggestions.  There have been a few issues/questions that have popped up, hopefully the tips below helps you out.

Here is a quick fix for the AdvanceMENU sound issue:

  1. ssh into your Raspberry Pi.
  2. exit out of AdvanceMENU by pressing Escape.
  3. at the console, type: nano +99 .advance/advmenu.rc
  4. edit the sound_background lines to look like below:
    1. sound_background_begin none
    2. sound_background_end none
    3. sound_background_loop none
    4. sound_background_loop_dir none
    5. sound_background_start none
    6. sound_background_stop none
  5. press control-x to exit, it will ask you to save, press “y” to confirm.
  6. Reboot your Pi and it should be good to go.

Adding games:

Your game files should go in the /home/pi/roms/ directory.  I cannot help you find games for MAME.

Stopping AdvanceMENU from starting at bootup:

If you want AdvanceMENU to not start at bootup edit /home/pi/.profile and remove advmenu from the bottom of the script.

Logging In:

The username and password are the default Raspbian ones.

  1. User: pi
  2. Password: raspberry
Nov 02

Friday Post: Wreck It Ralph!

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Happy Friday everyone!

I just got back from seeing Wreck-It Ralph and here’s my verdict:  Go see it right now. Not only was it a great story, it was a great homage to the entire gaming industry.

Today I also got an iPad Mini. I have an iPhone 4S and love it. At work I use an iPad 3 and have found it to be too big and bulky. This iPad Mini is amazing. It’s light, has a great screen, and fits my hand(s) perfectly. I’m even typing this whole post on the mini right now.   So far it’s totally worth it.

I got AdvanceMESS compiled with sound but I have yet to test it. I have an issue where check install doesn’t like installing both mame and mess because they have some of the same executables (advcfg, etc.). If anyone knows much about Debian package creation I would love some help and advice.

Have a great weekend!

Nov 01

Better AdvanceMAME debs with Sound!

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Hey All,

I have an updated set of AdvanceMAME debs.  This time there is sound, and a lot of the stupid tricks I had to do to compile have been resolved.  It ended up being a libsdl issue and an older version of GCC.

Please uninstall the older .deb by entering this command:

You should now be set to run AdvanceMAME with sound!

If you want to compile AdvanceMAME yourself, make sure you install libsdl1.2-dev and gcc-4.7. After that make sure to do export CC=gcc-4.7 and export CXX=g++-4.7 on the command line.  Then type ./configure, then make.