Hey All,
This has been a fun week. K and I have finished painting the house, we’ve been slowly bringing things in. All the fun joys of moving to a new place 🙂
This week I’ve been making progress with Joystick support in PiMAME. I’m hoping for 0.8 to have full joystick support implemented and an easy to use system to configure it.
Remember Cyber Monday deals this coming monday! SparkFun and Adafruit are having some great sales.
-Shea
Hello All,
Happy beginning of the holidays. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday… To all my friends here in the US, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I spent some great time with my family. To all my friends in other countries, I hope you are having a wonderful week 🙂
Raspberry Pi Camera
The Raspberry Pi Foundation today released the first video of the Raspberry Pi Camera. It looks like it’s going to be an awesome piece of kit. $25, 1080p video, 5MP pictures. I cannot wait to order one!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8N7kgtL0-Ts#!
Wii U
So I was able to purchase a Wii U Deluxe set during Black Friday. I was not expecting to come home with one. I was really just driving around looking at the lines. Toys ‘R Us had opened at 8, it was 8:20, and the line was short, so I decided to go in. I went to the back of the store, where the electronics section was, and asked if they had any Wii U’s in stock. I was completely shocked to be given a ticket for a deluxe model. My fiancee didn’t believe it either. 2 hours later (yay, waiting in line to pay) and I’ve got this thing hooked up.
The first thing it needed to do was download a huge update. It took about 2 hours to download and install. After that, it was smooth sailing. The system is awesome. The gamepad is not just a gimmick, it works amazingly well. It acts as a universal remote for my TV and my Cable box. It’s much faster to browse the cable guide using the Dpad than using the remote itself. Netflix is better on the Wii U than on the Xbox 360. To be able to select from the queue on the gamepad, watch it on the TV, or press a button and switch the stream straight to the game pad is so cool. It’s seamless.
Nintendoland is this consoles version of Wii Sports and Wii Play combined. You can use the Gamepad to play the games in single player mode, but to use 2 player you need to use Wiimotes. It’s nice they kept backwards compatibility. The ninja minigame is a lot of fun.
I also purchased New Super Mario Bros. U. The game is gorgeous in hi-def. The multiplayer mode can be a relationship killer though. Just warning you! The game plays like all the other NSMB games, but that’s a good thing. It’s great fun 🙂
Spark Fun Free Shipping
For Cybermonday, Spark Fun will be doing free shipping! Happy Hacking!
Megacynics DeskCade
To anyone who hasn’t read the webcomic Megacynics, you should start. It’s a great comic, Ash and Steve are cool people. I recently made a DeskCade for them. This time I tried it out of Acrylic. It took less time, but cost a bit more in raw material. I’m really happy with the look of it though. I have to find a better materials supplier.
Ornaments
I’ve also started making some ornaments on the laser cutter. I’m thinking of starting an Etsy store for them. I’m taking requests, so leave a comment!
Take care all!
Another fixit type post. Every so often I repurpose my Arduino and EL Wire for a new project, and each time I always forget how to properly get the EL_Escudo library resetup. I should probably just fork the code on GitHub with the fixes that have been posted, but who remembers to do that.
So, the EL Escudo is a cool shield for the Arduino. SparkFun sells it. I highly recommend them. There is a small bug in the library code that is fixed by bobmct’s post (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9259#comment-4eaad859757b7fd35100ba5d):
“I realize this is a rehash of what others above have said, but I got mine to work by doing the following.Getting the El Escudo to work
Two problems:
1. Must fix a mistake in the library code: Needed to make in EL_Escudo.cpp (thanks BMK):
void EL_EscudoClass::on(char channel)
{
pinMode(channel, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(channel, HIGH);
}
void EL_EscudoClass::off(char channel)
{
pinMode(channel, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(channel, LOW);
}
2. They also recommend GND and HVGND are tied together. Look at photo (thanks miku) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3551240/el-escudo.JPG . With the code change made above I also tried to see if the El Scudo would work without this jumber (between GND and HVGND), and it did work and it did work without it. I was using the EL_Blink.pde example when testing this.
The above got things to work with a handheld 3V inverter (two AA battery powered) with the button pressed 3 times (a steady AC supply, no blinking) with the output of this inverter connected to the El Escudo shield’s “EL Driver Inverter Ouput†JST jack.
The Arduino was powered from a 5VDC wall transformer (1A capacity) with the barrel jack plug connected either on the Arduino’s barrel jack connector or connected to the El Scudo’s “EL Driver Raw Voltage†JST connector.
You will need to fabricate the strange El Wire plugs to JST plugs to make all the connections. In my experience above, the polarity was not a factor because the output from the inverter is AC and so is the input to the el wire.
Hope this helps.”
My only issue was with number 1. Fixing that caused the main library to work again.
With the upgrade to Arduino 1.0, WConstants.h will throw an error since that isn’t being used anymore. You should be able to safely change all WConstants.h to Arduino.h