Been plugging away at my RetroPie build this Christmas holiday and keep running into all sorts of frustrations. I guess that’s the name of the game when you’re using an open source development board but I had hoped that things would go a bit smoother since it’s now been well over a year since the Raspberry Pi came out.
Since my last post I’ve managed to get it booting reliably. I downloaded a new image of RetroPie from a different source and that one works, so I’m not sure what happened to the first one I downloaded. After finally getting that booting up properly I setup the regional settings using sudo raspi-config. I also ran a firmware update and updated all the linux binaries by using the following commands:
sudo rpi-update sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
I destroyed my laser cut acrylic case while working on it the other night so I decided to sacrifice an old NES system I had laying around. After playing one last round of Dr. Mario (pretty much the only game it was willing to run) I said my goodbyes and pulled it’s guts out. They are now lying in a box which I’ve tucked aside in case I decide to rebuild it later on with another case or perhaps I’ll just sell it for parts on eBay.
The case itself looks quite roomy and I think it will fit the Raspberry Pi and a powered USB hub quite comfortably. I’m just debating either painting the case or maybe trying to bleach it with hydrogen peroxide as right now it has a really gross yellowy brown thing going on like most old electronics seem to develop.
I spent some time getting the wireless internet going on it using an Airlink 101 which is one of the recommended dongles. I got it a while back when I was using it as an XBMC machine but never really got around to play with it. Thankfully it worked out of the box, driver wise, but I still had to do some configuration to get it to connect and from there I ha to go into raspi-config again to turn on SSH so I could tunnel in remotely.
Sure enough, after all that work I went to install my Bluetooth dongle and it seems to have gone into La-la Land. After waiting an hour for the install and having the SSH connection drop on me so eventually I rebooted it and found the WLAN was no longer working. After a bit of monkeying around I noticed the dongle was smoking hot when I touched it so at that point I called it a night and unplugged it. Today I ran a network cable to the spot where I was working on it so now I will at least have that as a backup. After firing it up it seems that both my LAN and WLAN connections are running so I guess that’s good. Still not happy if it’s overheating but for now I can continue with my work. It just means I need to wire in a LAN connection on the back of this NES as I may need it as an alternative.
So I continued with my Bluetooth installation. I had used the git repo recommended in this video which was git clone https://github.com/the-raspberry-pi-guy/Wiimote.git but it just didn’t want to work. The device showed up when I typed lsusb but when I typed sudo service bluetooth status I got bluetooth: unrecognized service in response. Running /etc/init.d/bluetooth.dpkg-new status I got [FAIL] bluetooth is not running … failed! so I was dead in the water at that point.
At this point I jumped to another method and ran sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez-utils blueman and when it was done installing I ran /etc/init.d/bluetooth status.
[ ok ] bluetooth is running.
Success! That’s right my less than $2 bluetooth dongle from Deal Extreme was working. It only took a few hours of tinkering, but it worked 🙂
Next up was to start scanning for devices. I ran hcitool scan and got two devices listed back, my laptop and my phone. Awesome. Next I turned on the Wiimotes and scanned again… and only my laptop and phone were listed. Darn. After a bit of reading I discovered I had to press 1+2 on the Wiimote for a few seconds before scanning.
Scanning ...
1C:65:B2:A1:4A:D0 Samsung Galaxy S5
A4:2F:68:22:8G:09 FETTESPS-LAPTOP
F0:1F:B9:45:E3:78 Nintendo RVL-CNT-01
F0:1F:35:D1:76:21 Nintendo RVL-CNT-01
Brilliant. It’s always so simple once you know the solution.
At this point I think I’m going to stop and make an image of the SD Card as I was regretting not doing that when it last when unresponsive. I’d highly recommend doing this every time you get a big step of configuration done and then you have a backup if you mess up while working on the next steps. That’s it for this post!
A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 20 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.