clive | Raspberry Pi

What do you really think of the Raspberry Pi? No, really!

[update 25/11/2012: The survey is now finished. Thanks to everyone who contributed.]

By popular demand: a follow up survey with free-comment fields

Following your feedback from the original survey, the MBA team from Cambridge Judge Business School would like to pick your brains once more. The team were hugely impressed by the response and told us, “We greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from the community in terms of survey responses and comments on the webpage.”

The short follow up survey is a response to your requests for a chance to air your ideas and thoughts about the Raspberry Pi. It has a big free-text box at the end – so fill your boots! We’ll also post some preliminary data from the original survey here soon.

Adafruit’s new Raspberry Pi breakout kit: the Pi T-Cobbler

I have a recurring dream where I am ensconced in the Adafruit warehouse, rocking gently to and fro in the semi-darkness and occasionally reaching out to stroke some random electronics. And mewling. Is this normal? Why yes; yes, I think it is.

Adafruit keep on making great stuff for the Raspberry Pi and their latest product is a funky little breakout board called the Pi T-Cobbler.

The Pi T-Cobbler. T-shaped for clarity of labelling and overall friendliness

It’s based on the original Cobbler but is less compact and, well, T-shaped to make it easier to read the labels. It will break out GPIO, I2C and SPI pins from the Raspberry Pi header onto a solderless breadboard and looks the business if you fancy connecting your Raspberry Pi to the outside world.

Instructables Raspberry Pi Speed Challenge: the results!

Amanda from Instructables would like to thank everyone who entered their recent competition:

“The Instructables editors are proud to announce the winners of our two week Raspberry Pi Speed Challenge. In this contest we were looking for all types of content involving the Pi, this included projects, setup guides, troubleshooting tutorials, libraries/software, Raspberry Pi accessories, and more. We were really impressed by the quality of the projects that came in, and we had so many standout entries that we decided to hand out an extra second place prize!  The 1st place prize went to author meztek for his Raspberry Pi Powered Wearable Computer.

meztek’s Raspberry Pi-powered wearable computer

This wearable computer uses a pair of video glasses and a tiny keyboard/trackpad to browse the web wirelessly, type documents, remotely connect to meztek’s web server, and even check Gmail. Other winning projects included:

Voiceberry Pi by mrmath, a Raspberry Pi that can make free phone calls to anywhere in the US for free using Google Voice
Coffee Table Pi by grahamgelding, a modern take on an arcade game cabinet built into an elegant coffee table enclosure
LapPi by SilverJimmy, a wireless and fully functional Raspberry Pi notebook inside a sleek aluminum case
Raspberry Pi Smart Target by noelportugal, a target shooting game that posts pictures and outcomes of gameplay to Twitter

All 25 entries can be found on the Raspberry Pi Challenge page. We’re looking forward to running more contests for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, so stay tuned to our contest page for information about upcoming Raspberry Pi and electronics contests, and while you’re there be sure to check out the other Raspberry Pi projects on Instructables.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!”

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We’d like to thank Amanda and Instructables for running this, along with everyone who entered. The creativity and the innovation of the entries was remarkable.

Elite: Dangerous — the next game in the Elite series

…and we could hardly mention Elite without mentioning Elite: Dangerous.

Over a quarter of a century after the original, David Braben of Frontier Developments has launched a Kickstarter project to develop Elite: Dangerous, the next game in the Elite series.

If funding is successful the game is planned to be released on the PC in March 2014. There’s a huge amount of information over on the Kickstarter page, so if you want to see this happen (we do!) or even have a planet named after you then head over and see what all the fuss is about.

I was always rubbish at docking

Note: Mr Braben is also co-founder of a charitable Foundation that produces small, fruity computers. But we’re not bothered about that (I don’t think that the idea has legs myself).

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Raspberry Pi Gaming Day draws to a close

I don’t think that I’ll be able to top the news of Elite: Dangerous easily so I hereby declare Raspberry Pi Gaming Day closed. Which is lucky because the 24 hours are nearly up. A huge thanks to all of the contributors — there really is some fantastic stuff going on out there. We must do it again sometime…

How to play Elite on the Raspberry Pi

We could hardly have a Raspberry Pi Gaming Day without mentioning Elite. Pete Taylor shows how to run the iconic game on the Raspberry Pi. He says:

I grew up playing Elite – originally on a BBC B and then a few years later on it’s 32 bit successor the Archimedes, it was brilliant, addictive and years ahead of it’s time.

“It’s a bit stretched on my screen, but smooth and playable!”

The game “runs as smoothly as I remember, and is very playable”. At last, a chance to improve on my “Mostly Harmless” rating (and I think I only got that by cheating) — thanks Pete!

Pub Quiz!

Everyone loves a pub quiz: the inept, red-nosed Question Master screaming, “I am telling you matey–glass is in fact a super cooled liquid”; the know-it-all team in the corner who win every single week and do a special little victory dance on the table with their fingers; and the drunken brawls over whether the short-beaked echidna is a eutherian or a monotreme mammal. Happy days.

If you can’t get down to your local, François D has the next best thing: a Raspberry Pi quiz machine with four buzzers.

Each button controller is made from 1/2″ PVC parts and a momentary mini push button.

The Quiz machine stems from PyHack Workshop #01 which François says will now be a monthly event.

Guest blog # 6: MAME cabinet by Darren J

Raspberry Pi Gaming Day continues with a MAME cabinet. The arcade emulator MAME was first mentioned on the Raspberry Pi forum on 29 July 2011, just two days after it opened and the MAME meme has been popular ever since. We’ve seen our share of solid projects but Darren’s full size, ex-JAMMA cabinet complete with working coin slot is a thing of great beauty, especially if you spent the weekends of your youth perfecting your button flicking technique on the likes of Track and Field.

If the sound of the credits going on as the coin drops doesn’ t make you grin like a loon then you are dead; dead I tells ya! (Or under 30 years of age.)

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“At the end of November, it’s my girlfriend’s 40th birthday party, and it is 1980s-themed. To that end, everyone is wearing fancy dress, and the room we’re having the party in will have some 80s-themed props, such as a giant Rubik’s cube, etc. Having had a Pi for a few months and having played with it for a few Linux tasks as well as shocking people that something so small is actually a working computer, I thought what could be a better idea than a full-sized arcade cabinet with the Pi in, running MAME and the 80s classic game Track and Field, with the money to play going to a local charity, and a prize for the high score at the end of the evening? It seemed such a simple plan.

First up, I had to get hold of a cabinet, and fortunately one came up at the right price on eBay the week I thought about it. It’s a JAMMA cabinet which was a standard form of cabinet with a well-documented edge connector for connection to the brains of the game, and comes with a DC PSU, speaker and the coin counting mechanism, plus a big and heavy CRT monitor. The first job was to remove all the parts I wouldn’t be using, namely the monitor and its surround, and fitting a 19″ 4:3 TFT monitor in its place (which I’d been given when buying a cheap Shuttle PC a couple of months before).

A TV like what they had in the old days. Don’t fiddle about inside kids: there’s bad electricity! Seriously!

However, there was some disappointment next, the PSU didn’t work, so I needed to repurpose the PC from said Shuttle whose motherboard had expired! A simple bridge on the power connection meant it was powered on all the time, and it was easy to rig up a USB socket to power the Pi. The most important issue, however, was getting the inputs from the buttons and joysticks to the Pi. Initially I’d had the idea of using a keyboard and wiring into the matrix to achieve this, but a quick look at some emulation sites showed that USB keyboards were not renowned for good performance, so an iPac 2 was bought; I hadn’t seen any information on anyone using one with a Pi, but as it supposedly appeared as a standard USB keyboard to the host system, I thought it was worth a try. In addition, having screw terminals would make connecting all the buttons a breeze – it was a simple case of finding a pinout of the JAMMA edge connector and attaching the cables one at a time. With the addition of a powered USB hub, it was time to see if the Pi worked with the iPac 2.

Raspberry Pi and other innrds MAME cabinet

PSU — Raspberry Pi — USB hub — iPAC2

I needn’t have worried, it worked without any issues at all, so now it was time for audio. The JAMMA boards have a built in amplifier to power the cabinet’s speaker, but the Pi only has a line-level output. A simple DIY amplifier kit was bought on eBay for a few pounds, soldered up and connected to the appropriate cables in the cabinet, and a cable to take the output from one channel of the Pi’s output made up – the games of the period I’m interested in are mono, so that’s no problem. Everything was mounted to the inner board of the cabinet using either screws (for the iPac and amplifier as they had holes) or drilling holes in the board and using carefully-placed cable ties (for the Pi, USB hub and PSU).

Now it was time for the software. MAME is a big piece of software and takes a while to compile (I’d heard tales of 7 hours or so), but fortunately Shea Silverman’s excellent site provided a binary that was quick to download, and dead easy to run with his instructions. Once the Raspbian distribution was customised to work the way I wanted (most importantly to go to the command line rather than to the GUI on boot), I only had a couple of ROM images available, but fortunately one was Track and Field, and with a quick run of AdvanceMAME, it was working!

There were some configuration issues to address – one of the biggest was the inputs; AdvanceMAME is intelligent enough to know when you’ve got two keyboards connected and to differentiate between them, but if you’re planning long-term to have only an iPac in place then you should never run AdvanceMAME with both connected as later on you’ll have to reconfigure. Getting the screen resolution and expansion right for each game can take a few attempts, but once everything is set it’s easy enough to save the settings from the MAME menu and the game will be as it was the next time you reload it. Getting the audio volume right involved a potentiometer in the input of the amp to reduce the level; when connected directly it was far too loud, and reducing the volume in MAME meant the inevitable low-level noise on the Pi’s output was being amplified, so during portions of quiet there was a lot of background noise.

The cabinet came with a coin counter and converter board, which fortunately DIP switch connections were found on the Internet, and it recognises all modern UK coinage, allowing a game price to be set from 10p to £1.60.

I wanted the cabinet to be a stand-alone proposition, and use the AdvanceMENU front-end for MAME, but also to be able to lock the cabinet into the game. This was done by fitting a semi-concealed button to the underside of the cabinet (which generates an ‘ESC’ when pressed) and a keyswitch to disable it. By setting the Pi’s username and password suitably, it’s possible to log into it using only the buttons and joysticks, and also to run the Menu and shut the system down (as the left-hand joystick creates cursor key codes, it’s possible to recall previous commands, and enter is achieved by pressing the Player 1 start button and moving the joystick to the left).

The finished cabinet.

The look on my friend’s face when I showed him what was running the entire cabinet was well worth it – he couldn’t believe such a small machine is capable of running the system at all, let alone as well as it does. The shock must have explained how I came to beat such a “Track and Field Legend” just after!

At present the range of games the Pi can play is limited – some need emulation that’s just beyond it and the sound is usually the first indicator that things are not going to go well, but for vintage games it’s working well, and is exactly what I planned for – no hard drives to worry about, and much lighter than a fragile PC. I hope it’ll raise a decent amount of money as a group of 30- and 40-somethings try to relive their wasted youths spent competing at Track and Field! “

Marshmallow Entertainment System

All work and no PLay ma es Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull bot.
All work and NO play makes JACa dull boy.

Doesn’t it, though? There are some very nice gaming projects about at the moment so without further ado I declare that Wednesday 14^th November is Raspberry Pi Gaming Day!

The first project is a Raspberry Pi-based games console built by gamaral. It uses his Marshmallow Game Engine and a custom buildroot distro:

“Marshmallow Game Engine started as a way for me to keep my cross-platform game engine chops up during my spare time (not that I have that much spare time mind you). But with the advent of both powerful and affordable hardware like the Raspberry Pi, I started looking into creating my own game console again, and I have to admit, I’m very excited.”

We are too: it’s chock full of splendid retro gaming goodness. And the boot time is phenomenal. When I watched it this morning, I lost a gobful of Grape-Nuts into the shagpile as my jaw hit the floor:

Unless you have nictitating membranes you may miss this.

The prototype MES has a custom board to deal with power cycling. This adds to the cost, but gamaral suggests that if these are produced in numbers then they could come in at a couple of dollars.

The MES power cycling hardware

You can find more details and a video of the MES in action on gamaral’s MES page, and hardware specs and source code on his github account.

Guest blogs #3, #4 and #5

With all of the amazing projects we see using the Raspberry Pi it’s easy to become a bit complacent. But one of the main reasons that the Raspberry Pi was invented was to encourage a new generation of young people to get into computing. The following guest blogs are all shining examples of why the Raspberry Pi was developed. They are all quite different but have a common message: that it’s never too early to learn computing. Or to start creating things.

Thanks to Jake, Matthew and Ross for helping put things into perspective.

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Jake’s Raspberry Pi in near space

We like the fact that Raspberry Pis are being sent into near space (and coming down to earth unharmed!). The website is well worth a visit–it has some fantastic photos and lots of interesting data. And expanding marshmallows.

“My 13 year old son Jake designed and built a high altitude balloon for his 7th grade science fair. It reached an altitude of 85,011 feet. That is considered “near space”. At that height, the sky is black, and the curvature of the earth is significant.

The balloon capsule included a Raspberry Pi with an attached GPS and pressure sensor. The Pi was used to record the balloon’s coordinates, speed, altitude, heading, and pressure data throughout the flight on an SD card. My son used this data in his experiments. I am a developer, so I wrote a small Python script to gather the data.

The Raspberry Pi performed flawlessly during the flight. While other more expensive electronic devices in the capsule failed, the Raspberry Pi never stopped functioning, even through extreme low temperature and pressure, and a violent descent. Furthermore, after we found the capsule (about 5 hours after launch), the Pi was still recording accurate GPS and pressure data!

We were so impressed by the Raspberry Pi that we featured it on the project website: http://www.projectblacksky.com”

Three marshmallows and a grape at 55,999 feet.

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Matthew, The Raspberry Pi Guy

The Raspberry Pi Guy has created a huge amount of excellent Raspberry Pi videos. Matthew, his alter ego, explains:

“Hello, my name is Matthew. I am 13 years old and I recently started my own YouTube channel; all about the Raspberry Pi! I am called ‘The Raspberry Pi Guy’ and on my channel I cover a huge variety of subjects from GPIO related tinkering to Overclocking to Robots to Linux basics. Please don’t let my age tint your thoughts on it! Have a look.

I cannot thank the foundation enough for their amazing work! In fact Eben and Liz have become my personal heroes! I hope to take a computer science GCSE and then have a career in Technology… I have recently written a 3 page article in the MagPi on Overclocking and I hope that you will give it a look when it comes out this November! I am open to any suggestions/ ideas about my videos and please do not hesitate to voice them. Please take a look at my channel and I wish all of you the best of luck when it comes to everything Pi based!”

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Ross’ web server

There’s a reason that the Raspberry Pi was kept so affordable. Ross, 12, tells us how he built a web server–and other things–on a budget. And please do run that Raspberry Pi club Ross!

“A few months ago, around June, a friend of mine told me about a Raspberry Pi. During an IT lesson I looked at your website and loved the project. A few months later, the Pi arrived at my door.

My Pi comes in its Farnell box

The next problem was all the other parts. 2 days and all my pocket money later, just before I went on holiday, my Raspberry Pi was running (and this was without a keyboard – I used quemu to program it so it auto boots, then wrote quemu’s image file to the Pi).

I find out how tiny the Pi really is

Using my Pi, I have learnt a lot about python, Linux, and engineering. Whilst I was into programming before my Raspberry Pi (visual basic, HTML, java, action script etc) the raspberry pi really helped me learn python, which I use a lot now.

My Pi boots for the first time, the day before holiday. As you can see, no keyboard.

My school are waiting for theirs, and I may run a raspberry pi club in the future. My projects are:

A web server
An HTML editor in python
Programming your Raspberry Pi without needing to download anything, just point your browser to it.

So far, the last project is going okay. I call it chocolate ice cream (a joke on all the sweet android names). It is programmed in flash. When it is nearer to being ready I will put it on my website.”

What do you really think of the Raspberry Pi?

Update 16 November 2012 The survey has now finished. There will be more news on this soon. Thanks to everyone who took part.

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A team of MBA students from the Cambridge Judge Business School is researching the public perception of the Raspberry Pi and have a set up a surveyto help understand what both users and non-users think of it.

We get loads of informal feedback about the Raspberry Pi and it would be fascinating–and useful–to get a more structured opinion. The survey is anonymous and only takes a few minutes (literally–I’ve just completed it myself), so if you’d like to tell the team what you really think of the Raspberry Pi and what you are using it for (or not!) then please wander over and get clicking. Thanks!

Update 1700 GMT. The MBA team have been in touch and asked me to thank everyone who has taken the time to complete the survey: I’m told that the response has been the fantastic. The team do appreciate that the survey isn’t perfect and that they don’t have the technical expertise that many of you have, but they are working to a very tight deadline so I’m personally going to give them a little slack! The lack of open questions and a comment section, in particular, was intentional because it takes much longer to analyse such data, time they do not have. The survey is still ongoing if you’ve not completed it yet.

From a personal point of view, the Raspberry Pi is lucky to have such an experienced, active and vocal community, so thanks again to everyone who has contributed so far!