Pi Arcade Joystick Interfacing

I’m trying to get the entire department working on my Raspberry Pi powered gaming table. After sterling work by Peter on the cabinet, today it was the turn of James to lend a hand with the button and joystick interfacing. The kit that I’ve bought comes with a USB to button interface (you can see it at the bottom left of the above picture). all we had to do was wire the right buttons and switches to the pins on the interface, connect it to the Raspberry Pi and then remap the controls in the software to use the right switches. And the amazing thing is that we did just that.

By the end of the day we had an arcade game running and the only problem left to solve is getting the sound output to work. At the moment the Pi is putting the sound down the HDMI cable. We need to change this over to the 3.5mm jack socket and then I can get some amplified speakers connected.  At this rate it should be finished well before Christmas….

Hull College Come to See Us

Please note that this is not all of Hull College, just the ones that came to see us.

I did one of my “well planned” sessions today. Well planned right up to the point that I found that it wasn’t where I thought it was (Two Lecture Theatre A’s on the same campus? Who’d have thought?) and that the place where it really was has a video project that doesn’t work with my lovely tablet.

Fortunately Martin was there to save my bacon and do his bit before I did my bit, so I had time to go get the less lovely, but actually working, laptop. And I got some laughs, which is always nice. Especially if they are in the places I’m expecting…..

Three Thing Game October 2012

I took this picture at the last Three Thing Game during Platform Expo, when we had Imperial  Stormtroopers wandering around the campus, and even going shopping with the kids.

Anyhoo, the time for Three Thing Game is nigh again. We’ll be dishing out the things and getting people writing games in the week from 22nd to 28th of October. Teams of up to 4 students from Hull can sign up and take part. We’ll be having our “Thing Auction” on Monday, where teams can bid for “things” to base their games on. There might even be a special prize for the team with the “Most Valuable Thing”.

Once the things have been awarded, then the development starts. We’ll be running a Rather Useful Seminar on XNA game development in C# for those who are just getting started, and then on Saturday and Sunday, during the 24 hour “crunch development”  we’ll have experts from the MonoGame team showing us how to get our XNA games ported onto Windows 8 and maybe even into Windows Store.

The judging will be on Sunday 28th, when you get to see what everyone else has managed to produce. There will be prizes and, of course, great honour for the winners... Find out how to sign up and learn more about the competition at www.threethinggame.com

Raspberry Pi Tabletop Development

Spent a most excellent afternoon round at Peter’s working on the Raspberry Pi arcade table. I’ve found a cheap coffee table from Argos that should be able to house the monitor and the electronics. Today we were making a hole for the monitor and the joystick buttons.

Peter makes the first cut. Note use of a spacer piece of wood to make sure it isn't the deepest...

Fitting the monitor in place. Note the little tape tags at the top and bottom. We added those after we discovered that once we'd put the monitor in place we couldn't get it out again without a lot of faffing about.

This is the first plan of the joystick and button arrangement. Current idea is to be able to use it from either the side or the ends of the table.  If it doesn’t work, well, I’ve got a spare table….

Buttons in place. Note strange ritualistic markings above the buttons that are either where the joystick is going, or something much more sinister….

The unfinished finished product.

Hello Mr White

Bought a new laptop today. Not for me I hasten to add, but for Number One Wife, who has some writing to do. Her old laptop, still proudly bearing its “Made for Windows XP” sticker, has taken to forgetting the date and time and whether or not it has a hard disk attached. Replacing the battery that causes these memory lapses involves taking the machine to bits and unsoldering and replacing a component with a very very long part number, and to tell the truth I can’t really be bothered.

So, it was off to up town to see what could be acquired at the, ahem, lower end of the market. And we happened across the beast above. It’s made by Asus, has a processor which will do the job (word processing, surfing the net, maybe a bit of Skypeing), 4G of RAM, a reasonable sized hard disk and even a USB 3 port on the side. It doesn’t have an optical disk drive, but I can live without that. And you can get it for less than 300 quid. Even managed to buy it from one of our students, who works in Currys Digital up town.

I took it home, and once we had got over the 36 updates it wanted to install, cleared off all the rubbish littering the disk and installed Microsoft Security Essentials it works a treat. The battery life is not stellar, but it has this really nice multi-touch mouse pad that lets you scroll and zoom really easily. A properly useful device for rather less than the price of an iPad.

When Number One Wife goes out I might even pop Visual Studio on it and see what it would be like for developing Windows Phone applications.