Tag Archives: raspberry pi

Mar 08

Friday Post: Everyone Here Rocks!

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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.

41qHs4pmvyL._SS400_

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

Mar 01

Friday Post: PiMAME 0.6 Beta

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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.

Screen Shot 2013-03-01 at 9.28.02 PM

Release Notes:

  1. Support for the XArcade Tankstick.
  2. New menu at start to choose options before launching emulation.
  3. PIP (the Pi IP service) is available to install (but off by default).
  4. New admin options in the web frontend to Reboot and Shutdown your Pi.
  5. Smaller image should now install on most 2GB cards (with some room to spare).

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.

Get PiMAME 0.6 Beta2 now!

-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

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PiMAME 0.6 should be out this weekend 😀

Feb 16

Quick List of Raspberry Pi Disk Images

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Hey all,

A fellow Redditor ,  jfOIhe7Fl, has made a cool website which keeps track of pre-made Raspberry Pi Disk Images.

The site is available here: http://raspberrypidiskimages.com/ and the Reddit thread is here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/18n9w4/quick_list_of_raspberry_pi_disk_images/

There are some good ones in there, including PiMAME 😉

Hope you all enjoy it!

-Shea

Feb 15

Friday Post: Pebble

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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.

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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

Feb 07

PiMAME, AdvanceMAME, and AdvanceMENU Tankstick Configuration

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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 →

Jan 30

Video of XArcade Stick Working with the Raspberry Pi

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Hey All,

Real quick, just wanted to show a very rough video of me using the XArcade Tankstick on the Raspberry Pi.  I have the Trackball, Buttons  and Joysticks all working.  Gridlee has issues with it (has to have custom inputs set) but Street Fighter 2 and Missile Command worked “out-of-the-box”.  I had to make a minor edit to the AdvanceMENU configuration file, but it looks like its working nicely.

I’m going to try a fresh re-install of PiMAME and try to recreate the results.  I’m hoping to have a guide for this very soon ™.

-Shea

Jan 25

Friday Post: Little Boards

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Hey all,

I’ve been anxiously awaiting some voltage regulator boards I ordered from eBay for the past 2 weeks.  It seems they all came from China and all got here within a day or two of each other.  It’s kinda neat to see how each came packaged differently, through different mail systems, but yet all arrived safely on the other side of the planet.

Photo Jan 25, 9 41 31 PM

 

Photo Jan 25, 9 41 58 PM

 

My DigiSpark mini Arduino board came in as well.  This was a kickstarter based project from DigiStump that puts a whole Arduino with USB connector into a 1 square inch of space.

Photo Jan 25, 9 42 29 PM

It seems that the PiMAME 0.5 beta release is going well.  I advise everyone running it to expand the filesystem before uploading any games.  To do this, exit out of AdvMENU, then type sudo raspi-config on the command line.  Press enter and run the Expand Filesystem tool so you will have the usable space of your SD Card.  PiMAME was built to run on a 2GB SD Card, but only has 8MB of usable space be default.

Have a good weekend!

-Shea