GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

I've had a Sparkfun ESP32 Thing laying around on my desk since back in May when I met the fellow from Iron Transfer at a pinball convention, and we got to talking about IoT and his devices to remotely administrate pinball machines.  However, I spent tons of time this year planning for exhibitions, and didn't really get to do anything with it -- until now. Before You Begin There are a few choices you need to make up-front about which IDE you wish to use for development, plus which development framework.  I have chosen Microsoft's Visual Studio Code since it is cross-platform, feature-rich without hogging resources, free to download, and based on an open-source product similar to how Google Chrome is derived from Chromium.  It comes with extensions for language support and IntelliSense, which are must-haves when authoring code.  You are free to use an IDE of your choice; it won't really hamper your ability to enjoy the rest of this article. The other decision ...

From walking the show floor at Texas Pinball Fest 2016, I couldn't help but get the vibe that something novel and big would be in store for TPF 2017 -- something beyond the big but also typical/expected releases of commercial games such as The Big Lebowski and Ghostbusters  (more on those later), but in fact the ushering in of a new era: totally home-brew and open-source pinball.  As the re-themed games became more impressive from 2015 to 2016, and with easy access to leaning about hardware, fabrication techniques to develop new things and restore/renew/improve on old things, and a rejuvenated fascination with pinball in general, it was not surprising to me in the least that we would see someone totally knock it out of the park like Scott Danesi did at TPF 2017 with Total Nuclear Annihilation . However, just in case Scott wasn't there with his amazing game (for which I placed one of the pre-orders slated to ship sometime in 2018), I wanted to produce some work as well in or...

During graduate school, I was exposed to the power of CUDA cores through my parallel computing class.  Back then, there was a relatively small number of such cores on the video card inside their shared server, something like 40 if I remember correctly.  With my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti video card, however, I now have 768 CUDA cores at my disposal -- almost 20 times as many as in grad class 4 years ago! Not being much of a mathematician at heart, and generally spending time on logic problems, application testing, or new HTML5 & browser paradigms rather than crunching big data, I was never really inspired to do much with these cores.  This all changed when watching the Google I/O 2015 keynote address when they showed off the capability for you to draw (as best you can) an emoji, and Google's engine will try to recognize your scrawl and offer you up several profesionally-drawn emojis to represent whatever it is you're trying to express.  With recent changes in my...

Modified 9/16/2014 Those of you who have programmed an Arduino through the Arduino or AVR Studio IDE may have noticed the utility that is really doing the work: AVRDUDE (AVR Downloader/UploaDEr).  This is a powerful program that can facilitate programming new sketches on top of a bootloader, load a brand new bootloader or chip image, capture the current firmware programmed on the chip, and set fuse bits (which can render your chip unusable without special tools if you're not careful). You mean I could have been doing this the whole time? The LEDgoes USB Communicator supports both programming over serial (bootloader must be present) or via ICSP bitbang (very slow).  The ICSP operation is identical to Adafruit's FTDI Friend product.  The serial programming is identical to the Arduino, except that in my case, I'd like to be able to program two ATmega chips at the same time without switching cables.  What's the best way to do this? My original train of thought ...