Controlling an LED from a Raspberry Pi

Whilst fleshing out ideas for my new ZX Spectrum game, I’ve also found some time to work with my Raspberry Pi. A while ago I bought a breakout board kit for the Pi. This was easily constructed so I needed to then test it. The board connects via the i2c bus and exposes several ports that can be used as inputs or outputs. The controller chip only costs about a £1 so if things went wrong it is a lot cheaper to buy a new chip than it is a new Pi. By default the Pi has the i2c support turned off. This can be enabled by commenting out the i2c line in the blacklist file. A few supporting files need to be download and then it’s ready to work. I adapted some Python code and wired up a LED and resistor to my breadboard. I could then switch the LED on and off from the command line. This isn’t exactly rocket science but it proves that everything is installed correctly and I that can still solder properly. The next step is to look at controlling my amateur radio kit remotely. Here are some pictures of the board and a screen shot of the Python program. I am still using VNC to connect to the Pi so I can program from the comfort of my lounge.

 

 

 

Merry Christmas

Well that’s me done for another year. This hasn’t been a spectacular year for retro related stories on this blog but hopefully next year will be better. What I can say is that over the last month I’ve been working on a new design for a ZX Spectrum game. I don’t want to give too much away bit it will contain ghosts and a multi levelled mansion (no it’s not an Attic Attack remake). I don’t plan on linking it to my Iron Sphere character but I’m not ruling out a tentative link as the game design develops. As it is rare for me to have any spare time so don’t expect to see this game finished until this time next year. Hopefully I’ll be able to show some video clips of something working by the second quarter. Just like my other games, this will be released through Cronosoft (assuming they want it). 

Wishing you all a merry Christmas and a retro rated New Year.

Secret Santa

My colleagues know my interests and hobbies so well. This year my “Secret Santa” got me a short wave radio kit. That’s me sorted Christmas afternoon after a massive dinner.

Sweets at Christmas

By popular demand, here is a picture of a tin of sweets provided by the company for Christmas. As a bonus, one my colleagues brought in a cake made by his wife. We don’t go short on food here at work.

Christmas is here...at work

I’ve just been pressganged into putting up the Christmas decorations at work. Lots of sticky tape and paper clips were used in creating a winter wonderland. Careful planning was used to cause maximum inconvenience to taller members of staff… Ho Ho Ho :)

 

 

Virgin Atlantic Challenge on a Raspberry Pi

I can now die a happy man. After a bit of fiddling I finally managed to get the game I wrote back in 1986 to run on my Raspberry Pi. The game is “Virgin Atlantic Challenge” and you play the part of Mr B. Not a great game but good to see it running again on hardware I couldn’t have dreamt of way back then.

VNC running on a Raspberry Pi

Having a shortage of monitors around the house, I decided it would be easier to run VNC on my Raspberry Pi and connect to it remotely. I had some fun giving it a fixed IP address and amending my DHCP server to exclude this value. It took a little while to get everything to boot correctly and auto start the VNC server but I got there in the end. Here is a screenshot of the VNC client running on my Windows 8 laptop. If anyone wants some advice on how I set this all up, let me know and I’ll blog the settings etc.