Tag: FamiLAB

FamiLAB Orlando and a SNES (Super Nintendo Emulated System)

FamiLAB is a hackspace in Orlando, Florida that Eben and I had a really great time visiting back in October. It’s hidden away in an industrial unit – it’s a big space, with its own commercial-sized CNC milling machine, 3d printers, laser cutters, an in-progress replica of the Bridge from Star Trek: TNG, some traffic lights, a cherry picker and a whole bunch of computers – broadly speaking, it’s pretty close to heaven. And it’s full of some great people, who use the space to get together, eat pizza, learn things (just this week their timetable include tutorials with the Pi, with Arduino, a microcontrollers show-and-tell session, a learn-to-solder session and an intro to Scratch), and make really, really cool stuff.

Ted from Familab has made a Raspberry Pi SNES hack with a difference. We see quite a few really nice little projects where an old console is gutted, a Pi stuffed inside, and the games run on the Pi. This is a bit different. It’s not just a casemod; it’s a Super Nintendo emulated on the original hardware; and it even reads (and stores the information from) old cartridges; it can write saves to them too!

This is not a project for beginners; its scale may be a little intimidating for those new to electronics. However, Ted’s documented what he did, from planning through research and construction, in minute detail, making this project easy to emulate once you are comfortable with a soldering iron.

 

Video from Orlando

The Orlando Sentinel shot some video with Eben when we were at FamiLAB last week. (This requires a click-through because I can’t embed their video.) Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda, the journalist who shot this, has very kindly sent me some embed code; apparently we can expect some accompanying text at the Orlando Sentinel later on too. It’s well worth a watch – it’s only a couple of minutes long, but it’s packed with information, and there are some brilliant Raspberry Pi projects on display. Yes, we’ll be writing about Lance’s camera mount as soon as it’s ready!



Thanks again to all at FamiLAB (and thank you, John, for the USB blinky lights, which are currently wreathed around my monitor).

An award win! And a teeny-tiny MAME cabinet from Orlando, Florida.

Before I start on the meat of this post, I have a boast to make: we won another award! We’re so excited at the way the press about Raspberry Pi has been getting recently; I got into the car we’d hired to take us home from the airport yesterday, and the driver lunged into the passenger seat and brought out a copy of Stuff Magazine to show us, with a two-page spread about things you can hack with your Raspberry Pi. Then, last night (at an event we were sadly unable to attend), we won a T3 Award for Innovation of the Year. We’re very proud, very pleased and extremely grateful to all of you who voted to get us onto the shortlist.

Back to the matter in hand. One of the nice things about this mini-tour of US hackspaces that Eben and I have just completed has been the way we’ve met some people we feel we already know well from the forums or from this blog and its comments section. Shea Silverman is one of those people; he’s had a MAME project featured here before, and he’s been helping people in our forums out with their MAME ideas too. Turns out that in real life, he’s a lovely, lovely chap. I spent a long time with Shea, coveting his newest Raspberry Pi hack: a miniature MAME cabinet which, when we saw it, was doing a very smart job of running Street Fighter II on its 2-inch display. I am still feeling terrible about the bit where I got over-enthused and started to walk across the room to show it to someone, forgetting that it was still plugged in at the wall. Happily, Shea has an awesome rugby-tackle on him (for an American). This cabinet is laser-cut using the facilities at FamiLAB, a really impressive hackspace in Orlando, Florida. This machine is running Advmame under the latest Raspbian at 900mhz; Shea will be releasing the SVG files for the cabinet itself soon (he’s planning to upgrade the screen to a 3in one for better visibility).

Shea has written a bit about the evening on his blog. I’m hoping we can return to some of the places we visited on this trip later on – we had an absolute blast on this trip, and really want to see what you all get up to over the next year with your Raspberry Pis!