We also visited the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. It was pretty amazing, but we somehow neglected to take any pictures other than this one. Sean really dug this thing though - there were bubbles on the underside of the tank that he could pop up inside of and look around. It was pretty cool - I only wish I could have fit under there myself! All in all, it was great aquarium - I think I liked it even better than the one in Baltimore.
Another stop on our trip was at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. It was pretty cool in there - they had way more skeletons than I would have expected. Among the larger skeletons they had a brontosaurus, a triceratops, and a stegosaurus - but they also had a whole bunch of raptor-sized skeletons too (think Jurassic Park). Among the mammal skeletons they had a prehistoric elk with antlers nine feet across! The plaque said the antlers weighed more than the rest of the skeleton combined! They didn't allow any photos inside the museum, but we got this one from the outside.
The first stop on Sean's road trip was the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. We didn't take many pictures, but that's only because we were having such a good time. But we did get one cute pic of this red panda lounging about. Looks like a pretty good thing he's got going on there.
"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."
I've been working on another Raspberry Pi project while I try to decide how I want to proceed with the Gameboy. This little box is just about done. The box is made of a single, solid piece of bubinga, and houses a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie/EmulationStation. It runs all of the old console emulators - NES, SNES, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Color, Sega Genesis - you name it. If it was out during the 80s or 90s, it probably supports it. I've got it setup with two USB-based SNES reproduction controllers, with extension cables long enough to reach the couch. As soon as I finish putting the rest of the ROMs on it, it is ready to move upstairs to the living room. I'll try to grab some "action shots" once I've moved it to its final home.
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This next item is one of the first genuinely useful things I've printed. It's a clamp that lets the kids attach their tablets to the tripod when they want to make videos. It sure beats their old method of propping it up with books and hoping it doesn't fall over while they are recording.
I've been working on a project with the Raspberry Pi to make a Nintendo Gameboy style handheld that can play all of the original NES games. It's based on this project over at adafruit. So far it has been going really well, but I've hit a snag with getting the controls to line up correctly with the cutouts in the top cover, and getting everything to fit correctly inside - it seems like I've always got at least one button that doesn't line up right and I've got to open it up all over again. I need to do a little more fussing with it before it will be finished. Stay tuned!
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