OK, to make the script run at bootup do the following:
Log into the Pi and create a script called launcher.sh with the following:

Change the cd line to match wherever you have put the program files and



Save the file then make it executable with the command

Now add the following line before the exit(0) command in rc.local



Save rc.local and reboot, the script should start automatically at boot.

Further addendum:

There seems to be an issue with the new version of the Raspbian image. Just got a Pi Zero-W, imaged the latest version of Rasbian and the screen no longer works, the older version of Raspbian works fine with the W model, it's just the version for March that seems to have issue. Will work on this more to see what the fix is.
Bit of a bummer because the older version of Raspbian that does work with the screen, doesn't work with the onboard wireless

I am trying to run down adapters and parts to condense the size of the rig. This part is very slow.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

OK figured out the display on the new Raspbian images for version 4.4 and above.
The problem is the way that the TFT driver has been implemented as part of the new driver tree structure, instead of using the modules, you have to configure the driver in the /boot/config.txt file.
Another rproblem is that the wiring is hard coded in the driver, you can't define the GPIOs yourself and they have moved the reset from GPIO 25 (which is what I was using) to GPIO 23.
Once you have rewired, add the following lines to /boot/config.txt



After that you should just need to add


to the end of /boot/cmdline.txt to get the display working

The only other thing is to add a weyland yeutani loading logo before it initializes the primary screen as that has been common on some of the other motion tracker renditions.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

I'm really not a fan of adding the WY logo. I say keep it in line with the military stuff we see on screens in the Sulaco, dropship cockpit, APC command center and GRID screen for the sentry guns. There is plenty of inspiration there that has been largely ignored in favor of the (over used) Weyland-Yutani stuff.

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My entry-level prop and costume tutorials: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12751

Agreed, I'm going to try hacking together a USCM logo like this:



Maybe with a WY logo faintly in the background

On the hardware side of things, I've got the sound working through a USB sound stick connected to the Adafruit pre-amp but I want to try messing with a DAC setup to keep the size down.
Also, need to replace the crappy speakers I was testing with for something a bit meatier. They were ripped out of a cheapy poundshop effort so the volume on them isn't enough when buried in the guts of a Kango drill casing

I have everything except the pi and MOM switch in the viewer housing.

I use a 4 ohm 3 watt TV speaker from adafruit and it seems to work OK.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

If I could cast one of the speakers to sit in the faux flash unit on top we would really be set speaker wise. Having the speaker sitting inside the housing kills sound making ability.

I would like to adapt this
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1824
in place of the casio calculator.

This unit would work as well:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1332
I used this on my predator sound box for some compact push buttons.

This could work in place of the casio sticker possibly:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/1333
This one wouldn't require changing the code, just a connection to ground and positive.

I may have to research making my own custom speaker housing and hacking a custom speaker housing to sit on top of the unit.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

I successfully managed to hook up 4the preamp to the GPIO and got sound out without the bulky USB adaptor I was using, I'll write it up and put instructions on my website when I get a chance..

In my setup, I have a cylindrical battery, the type you use to charge a phone, sitting in the forward section of the tracker where the wire mesh is.POower out is plugged into the Pi and power in USB for charging goes into the little black case on the left of the tracker, this allows me to charge the battery without disassembling the case and the little box is big enough for a decent sized cable to be stored in.
IOn the slide viewer is a board that the TFT plugs into and a couple of flashing LEDs. I want the green LED to flash in time with the 'click' noise.

At the moment, the Pi is in the main body of the usint, the wires for the display are covered in heat shrink tubing and fed out to the slide viewer where they plug into the display.
My aim is to have a 'hat' built for the Pi for all the cables to connect to and to mount the digital compass and the audio components onto in one unit. I have a prototype on a bit of stripboard at the moment, it has a 40 way connector to plug onto the Pi and a connector for the digital campass. I plan to add the audio circuit to it as well.
Once I have all the components working and mapped out, I plan to get a proper circuit board printed up and see if I can find a company to make the board for me.

Still to add on - an on/off switch to properly start and shut down the Pi

In place of the flash unit on the right side I built a foam housing to slide a pkcell 2200VA battery in and out. Unplug the USB cable to it and the PI is off. There are some USB cable assemblies that have on/off switches built-in and that would be a better option.

As far as the housing goes it is 4 sided 1/4" sealed foam coated in fiberglass resin on the exterior and then coated in plasti dip. Works fine to hold the battery. Looks close to the screen piece, but functionality over form I suppose.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

An on/off switch on the USB battery doesn't allow for proper shutdown of the Pi which can lead to corruption or damage to the SD card I think matching the membrane switch you referred to above (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1333) with something like this
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/onoff-shim

Would be the best way to go.

Actually, just using pin BCM 18 and scripting it to run sudo reboot. The shim would not fit in the bay of the main body with the other stuff.

If that is installed I think it would be possible to capture the needed code and adapt it into your existing script for push button reboot and shutdown. I am surprised that the Pi Zero W does not include a built-in power switch which would make everything easier.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

I've uploaded a new version of the code. File is now called motiontrackerv3.3.py

Changes:

The main program loop is now timed to half a second per wave, this is to try and get it more uniform as previously the wave speed was very random.
The button function for adding a blip to the tracker has now been changed to an interrupt rather than as being part of the main loop
The GPIO pin for the button has been changed to GPIO14, I couldn't get interrupts to work on GPIO25
The size of the blips has been increased, let me know if you think this is an improvement.
Audio has been cleaned up and the volume increased, still looking for better audio sources, if you have them, let me know.

Have you played with Audacity any? It is open-source and free. I use it to tweak any of the sounds I am using. I normally have to add a +13db boost to the sounds to get good speaker response. I usually also remove any sound tails at the beginning or end of the sound file.

Now, if you are wanting straight audio rips from the movie, get an ISO of the movie and feed it through transcode like this:
If you are running linux you can do this to convert a dvd iso to a wav file with this command:

transcode -i isoname.iso -x dvd -T 6, 01 -a 0 -y wav -J resample -E 11200 -m filename.wav

-x impors with vmod as a dvd
-T is the title number and chapter
-a extracts the track
-y exports with video modules
-J filter
-E audio output sample rate
-m names the audio output file

I use this to make custom sound rips. once you have the wav file, you then open it with audacity and watch the film to note what seconds you need to rip and there you go. Just be very careful about sharing the files you have or rather don't to keep the IP police off your back...

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

Here are the suggestions for your sounds:
convert all tracks to mono (You only need one good 4 ohm 3 watt speaker.)
tracker click_load up by 2db
tracker pulse by 20db
tracker pulse2 by 20 db
tracker pulse3 by 20 db

The extra Decibels are just below max for the files. This will give you sufficient noise for effects. You may have to play with them to get just the right sound boost you want.

as far as the GPIO goes, some of the pins can only be used in certain functions and then only in certain ways. I remember reading where a couple of the pins had issues and they were still figuring out why, but that was on some arduino hardware from adafruit.

I just hope I am helping and not being annoying.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

I have no knowledge of any of this stuff, but it is fascinating to read this back and forth as you guys figure it out. I really hope 2017 is the year we crack the Motion Tracker conundrum.

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My entry-level prop and costume tutorials: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12751

I used Audacity on the current files to amplify and clean them up a bit.
Also didn't realize I had the volume turned down on the Pi. Once I used alsamixer and turned the volume up full, the little cheap speakers turned out to be quite loud

I've uploaded video of the new build at work on youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE-rU1JVD5w

Well, I can't assume anything, I suffer from foot in mouth disease anytime I do. Plus a lot of folks don't even know about great free programs like:
Audacity <--audio editor
GIMP <-- GNU Image Manipulation Program (on par with illustrator/photoshop)
VLC <-- Video Lan Corp player (can do some minor video editing, stress on minor)
Transcode <-- decoder/encoder for linux. Very powerful and handy utility

As far as turning up the alsamixer audio, did you do that within the system and then launch the script? From what I was reading on the Pi that was not a saved setting so the sound tweak would be lost upon reboot.

Supposedly the updates for NOOBS and Raspbian fixed a load of issues including Alsa sound system functionality.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

Surprisingly I'm familiar with Audacity, GIMP, and VLC (which I use to get my Bluray screenshots from the Anthology)

I'll suggest this too:

Blender <-- Free open-sourced 3D modeling/animation/game engine platform (www.blender.org)

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Lt. Melissa L. Klassen, ALG
AL Colonial Admin. - Executive Officer (XO) -- 2021-2022
RCCM | Royal Canadian Colonial Marines - Commanding Officer (CO) -- 2021-2022

Read the AL Charter Rules & Regulations: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i3gd9QUyIqI_6rfk8kpxspbKU-JT4MBAjLPxfCkvGJ8

[quote="knoxvilles_joker
Well, I can't assume anything, I suffer from foot in mouth disease anytime I do. Plus a lot of folks don't even know about great free programs like:
Audacity <--audio editor
GIMP <-- GNU Image Manipulation Program (on par with illustrator/photoshop)
VLC <-- Video Lan Corp player (can do some minor video editing, stress on minor)
Transcode <-- decoder/encoder for linux. Very powerful and handy utility

As far as turning up the alsamixer audio, did you do that within the system and then launch the script? From what I was reading on the Pi that was not a saved setting so the sound tweak would be lost upon reboot.

Supposedly the updates for NOOBS and Raspbian fixed a load of issues including Alsa sound system functionality.[/quote]

I wouldn't worry about it, foot in mouth disease is a known issue for those of us who work in IT. I got fired from a support job once for muttering "F***ing idiot" to a caller under my breath once. In my defence it did take him 12 attempts to type the word "paint" despite me spelling it out phonetically

I use Windows as my main machine with Audacity, Photoshop, VLC and Handbrake for encoding\decoding, my Linux boix is working as a mail\web server with no GUI.
I much prefer working on the command line with Linux.

Also alsamixer does now retain volume settings on reboot, this makes things a little easier

I wouldn't worry about it, foot in mouth disease is a known issue for those of us who work in IT. I got fired from a support job once for muttering "F***ing idiot" to a caller under my breath once. In my defence it did take him 12 attempts to type the word "paint" despite me spelling it out phonetically

I use Windows as my main machine with Audacity, Photoshop, VLC and Handbrake for encoding\decoding, my Linux boix is working as a mail\web server with no GUI.
I much prefer working on the command line with Linux.

Also alsamixer does now retain volume settings on reboot, this makes things a little easier[/quote]

These are all true:
One two separate occasions I had customers think the cd tray was a coffee cup holder.
One of my coworkers was getting a case of the giggles at work as the old man accused his wife of sticking the floppy thingy in the wrong hole (Compact Disc in the CD Drive)
I keep on running into cases where folks things turning the monitor off and back on is a computer reboot.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

I remember giving advice to someone who had just bought a new peripheral and was worried about blowing his PC up by plugging it in wrong.

"Just remember that plugging things into a PC is a bit like having sex, if you have to force it in, you're probably putting it in the wrong hole".

can you check the file download link on your site. It appears to be broken.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

Hmm, something seems ot have gone wrong with the website publishing.

THis linkshowuld workL
http://virtualfrontiers.co.uk/pi_files/pitracker.rar