Useful Links for SPI LCD Interfacing

Display
https://www.hackster.io/148468/display-images-on-a-st7789-screen-fbb0d7#team
http://www.voidcn.com/article/p-ckeaxixr-gx.html
https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/1.3inch_LCD_HAT
http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/Matrix_-_2%278_SPI_Key_TFT#Launch_Lubuntu_Desktop_on_2.8.22LCD
https://github.com/solinnovay/Python_ST7789/blob/master/setup.py

• Demo code

GPIO
https://github.com/auto3000/RPi.GPIO_NP
https://opi-gpio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://sourceforge.net/p/raspberry-gpio-python/wiki/Home/

SPI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Peripheral_Interface
https://github.com/doceme/py-spidev

Doom on the NanoPI

For one of my products I'm working with the NanoPI which is very similar to Raspberry PI but more powerful. It is developed by FriendlyElec and has a large family of boards. My board has the following specifications

• CPU: Allwinner H3, Quad-core Cortex-A7@1.2GHz

• GPU: Mali400MP2@600MHz，Supports OpenGL ES2.0

• DDR3 RAM: 1GB

• eMMC: 8GB

• Wireless: 802.11 b/g/n

• Bluetooth: 4.0 dual mode

• Antenna Interface: Shared by WiFi and Bluetooth, IPX interface

• Connectivity: 10/100/1000M Ethernet

• Audio: 3.5mm jack/Via HDMI

• Microphone: onboard microphone

• IR: onboard IR receiver

• USB Host: USB 2.0 x 3, 2 x USB Type A and 1 x 2.54mm pitch pin-header

• MicroSD Slot: x1

• MicroUSB: power input and data transmission, OTG

• Audio Output: HDMI 1.4 1080P, CVBS

• DVP Camera Interface: 24pin, 0.5mm pitch FPC seat

• Serial Debug Port: 4Pin, 2.54mm pitch pin-header

• GPIO： 40pin, 2.54mm pitch pin-header, compatible with RasberryPi 2's GPIO. It contains UART, SPI, I2C, I2S/PCM, SPDIF-OUT and IO

• User Button: 1 x Power Button and 1 x Reset Button

• LED: 1 x Power LED and 1 x System Status LED

• PCB Dimension: 64 x 60 mm, ENIG

• Power Supply: DC 5V/2A

• OS/Software: u-boot, Debian, Ubuntu-MATE, Ubuntu-Core

Interestingly today the Raspberry Foundation announced the more powerful RaspberryPI 4 model B. It has some powerful features along with multiple RAM versions, the cost is similar to existing model. The base model costs $35 and upwards based on more RAM. Some of the new features include different RAM versions (LPDDR4) (1-4GB options), 4K video display over 2 micro hdmi slots, BT 5.0, 2 x USB 3.0 ports and USB type C power port.  It has the following specifications:

DOOM On NanoPI

NanoPI has a small form factor and is pretty fast. I've been running different experiments with it but one thing that I completely missed was to run Doom on it! So here are the steps if you want to run Doom on NanoPi 

Step 1: Install Dependencies 

 sudo apt-get install libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev python-imaging

Step 2: Download Doom

wget https://www.chocolate-doom.org/downloads/2.2.1/chocolate-doom-2.2.1.tar.gz




Step 3: Extract Downloaded file

tar xzf chocolate-doom-2.2.1.tar.gz

Step 4: Configure and Make

cd chocolate-doom-2.2.1

./configure

make




Step 5: Install (This will take a few minutes)

sudo make install

Step 6: Download Doom Data WAD File

wget http://www.doomworld.com/3ddownloads/ports/shareware_doom_iwad.zip

Step 7: Unzip WAD

unzip shareware_doom-iwad.zip

In case you don't have unzip install it using:

sudo apt-get install unzip

Step 8: Run Doom Setup:

chocolate-doom-setup

Step 9: Run and Enjoy!

chocolate-doom -iwad DOOM1.WAD

Reference:
This post used content from https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/run-doom-raspberry-pi/

Best day so far!

This MIT Bootcamp has been one of the best experiences of my life! Alhamdulillah (All praise is for Allah, the Rab of the heavens). The bootcamp has been going on since last Saturday and I plan to write one post about my experience as a whole, but today was special! Today there was a lecture by Joi Ito the director for Media Lab at MIT. It was a fascinating lecture where he touched on how technology is affecting the world and what will be the future of AI. He touched on very interesting points of how we should control AI. I noted down some interesting quotes from his talk..

"Usually history is repeating itself until it doesn't!"
"We have to reinvent Democracy because it's broken"
"We should fix capitalism"

He touched on a very interesting point about this notion of screen time for kids. He said this is mostly an elitist stigma that screen time is bad for kids. He argued that for the kid of a working mother, the screen was a window to the outside world! Limiting screen time is just stupid! I asked him a question "How can developing countries leverage current and upcoming technologies to skip decades of development and join the first world?" for which the answer is embedded in the video below!

PyCon Meetup and visiting Lahore!

While browsing through my daily feed I came across this TechJuice article on an upcoming Python Pakistan conference. Being a Python fan, I just couldn't pass on the opportunity and as the call for proposals was open, I submitted a proposal for a workshop. The proposal is about Programming Robots with Python! Combining my love for robotics and my liking for Python, I thought to myself why not! 

At LearnOBots my EdTech company we have developed a cost effective programmable mobile robot for kids. We use Arduino with a graphical programming environment to teach kids how to program the robot. For PyCon I thought we could easily replace the Arduino with a Raspberry PI and start programming the robot to do cool stuff like making line following and obstacle avoidance robots, delivery robots for Warehouses etc.

So at the start of last week I received a call from the PyCon organizers that they were organizing their 3rd meetup in Lahore on Friday (Sept 8th) and asked if I would like to attend. I thought why not, summer is just about over, Fall semester is about to start, I know I would get really busy with my teaching so let's just visit Lahore on the weekend. Turns out the meet-up was mostly to discuss the organizational issues along with setting up committees to look after the conference. It started off with Badar Khushnood (of Google / Twitter) and Khurram Zafar (of LUMS Center for Entrepreneurship) sharing their experiences of organizing conferences. The proposals were also discussed and I got to express the need for my proposal. Although it still hasn't been accepted but it was cool to discuss something totally different. I was the only one talking about playing with hardware using Python. The call for proposals is still open, so if you are interested you'd better submit one right now! 

All in all I've had a good weekend trip to Lahore, met some cool people and my wife spent around 5 hours at Lahore's Liberty market trying to order Jora's for her cousin's upcoming wedding! By the way I'm assuming 5 hours as it's around 4 and a half hours already and I'm blogging from Liberty Market right now! I'm assuming she would be back in 30 mins! Here are some pictures that I took for contributing to Google Maps. These are of the recently opened Packages Mall.