Painfully Obvious.

A look at three successive attempts to make my scanner less annoying to use.

We need a broker between the laundry spy and the rest of the world, so here’s an abridged primer on setting up Node‐RED and MQTT on a Raspberry Pi.

The best way to synchronize your monitor and marquee to your Pi’s power state without wiring up your own power outlet.

You might have noticed that your list of installed games looks a bit bland in EmulationStation without artwork, game descriptions, and the like. You could use the metadata scraper that comes with RetroPie, but for MAME games I think it’s better to leverage the pedantry of the community and fill your game lists with more reliable metadata.

For the moment I’m out of hardware topics, so let’s look at some stuff that might be more widely applicable to folks who don’t make my exact hardware choices.

It will have become clear to most readers that I swung for the fences on this project. The two ServoStiks I purchased prove the point: they can switch between 4‐way control and 8‐way control. Did I need this? No. Was I going to take advantage of it once I bought them? Of course.

Let’s make the poor‐man’s version of LEDBlinky: a way to light up specific buttons for specific games using a Pac‐Drive and some shell scripts.

How to wire up a hardware knob that controls the Pi’s software volume level via GPIO.

I wanted an easy way to power the system on or off without going through a menu. I managed to do it with a hardware add‐on and a simple Python script.

All the stuff I wish I’d known about RetroPie and MAME that wasn’t written down in one specific place.