Simplifying the Joysticks' Wiring

Our Parallel Pong game uses a couple of Zippy Joysticks, which have been connected via a breadboard. In order to free the joysticks from the bulky breadboard and ensure more secure wiring, we acquired a small Adafruit PermaProto board and a ribbon cable to transfer the functions of the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins directly to the board.

PermaProto Board and ribbon cable

Raspberry Pi Cluster Rack Sketch

If you've looked at the earlier posts, you probably noticed the spaghetti with Raspberry Pis laid out in front of the display wall. +ET Parreira has certainly mentioned it to me, after he had to set up Pong after Triton Day. That's what happens when you're feeling your way around a new piece of hardware and just trying to get the code working.

Parallel Pong on Raspberry Pis

When building a cluster computer, you need software to run on it. We thought that games would be a great demonstration and this lead us to embark on making the greatest game to ever come to distributed programming, pong.

Everyone needs one of these

Interfacing Zippyy Joysticks with the Raspberry Pi

In a later post, you'll read about a parallelized version of pong painted on a grid of computer screens. This sub-project was to interface joysticks up to a controlling node in the pong cluster and give it a classic cabinet feel. The only difference is that it is displaying on 15 screens! Until we got this working, we had to watch an AI enjoy the game.

UCSD Triton Day 2013

This Saturday, we moved the Sandbox into SDSC's lobby for Triton Day, UCSD's open house for newly admitted students. We set up the OptIPortable that we've been using to try out building tiled displays with Raspberry Pis, since Erik's code (details in a later post) has reached the working demo stage. We thought it would be cool to let next year's students see what kind of things they can find on campus. Some of them had worked on some serious electronics projects in high school, including underwater autonomous vehicle and a NanoRacks experiment.

The SDSC Sandbox undergraduates (seated) working Raspberry Pis. From left: Amy, Alex, and Erik.