Skip to content

Raspberry Pi

Bartop Arcade

I’ve wanted to build a bartop MAME cabinet for a while, my first attempts last year led to 4 failed CNC jobs, infact the first side panel I did for this project ended up the same way (top left): The Z axis fails; instead of going up, it skips the instructions to raise, and then drills down into the wood, going further and further until either the bit snaps or I turn it off (to prevent fire). This second attempt was successful – I worked out that if I don’t put the front and top panels on the CNC machine it doesn’t happen. I still don’t know why, but it does mean that it’s a lot louder and there is more dust. In this cabinet I wanted to press fit the center panels into the… Read More »Bartop Arcade

LCD TV Table – Inprogress

Having a coffee table with a TV screen in it doesn’t serve any real purpose, but if you have an unused, trashed, coffee table and 80cm LCD TV, it cant hurt to merge the two. The table is a brown Ikea coffee table from the Markor range. I haven’t got any product links for it. I’m assuming it’s discontinued. The TV/monitor is an Panasonic 80cm LCD with 2x HDMI inputs. The media player is a 512MB Raspberry Pi running Openelec (Kodi). The table was in the Mancave for a while and had oil and glue over it. It was roughly sanded with a belt sander (quickest option). Next I took measurements of the bottom inner space under the table to correctly center the TV screen to table top. Beige: Area available for the TV on… Read More »LCD TV Table – Inprogress

Solidoodle 2 – Arrived, let the printing begin!

It took about 12 weeks – 10 for manufacture, and 2 for delivery. I finally have a Solidoodle2 running test prints. First issue to over come out of the box was trying to find documentation on where to start. Does it need calibrating, does it need a firmware upgrade, etc.. Couldnt find any guide that started “OK so now that you’ve opened the box”, similar to the way you normally would with a paper printer. So I just plugged it in, downloaded the software, and tried a few test prints. About 20% of the prints would stick to the heated bed, so after emailing support, I found that the bed temperature was set too low. Turned it up and it changed to about 90% success rate. On most of the medium sized prints the Y… Read More »Solidoodle 2 – Arrived, let the printing begin!

DIY MAME Cabinet

Raspberry Pi

Thanks to a very generous teacher at an educational institute (cheers Trevor), I now have a Raspberry Pi (model B) for testing. I’ve been interested in this project: Porting LinuxMCE MD to Raspbian, and hopefully will contribute when I have time to test/compile. To check the CPU/GPU speed, I tried installing Quake3. Had to compile from source code to fix library errors, and about an hour later, I had some Y2K era gaming fun. The FPS are a little laggy, but still enjoyable. Next tried an XMBC distro XBian. Initial play back was smooth, but then decayed and the audio was out of sync for movie clips. Audio visualizations weren’t accurate using HDMI (analog may be different). Which is a pitty because my original XBox played them fine. The main difference is the higher resolution… Read More »Raspberry Pi