Playing with the Rasberry Pi - custom download tracker

jonmulcahy

I've been working on something cool over the past few days, thought I would share it. Late last year I bought a Rasberry Pi B+ for kicks. This week I finally got around to doing something cool with it.

This is my custom made DownloadTracker90000! Using the concepts I came up with here: Sending and Receiving Data, Stats Dashboard, and Unique IDs, I came up with this system. It's a Rasberry Pi powered download tracker. It's configured to track 3 games. Building Jumper, A Long Way Home FireTV Edition, and Ten Years Left, my upcoming game. Every time one those games is downloaded and opened, an LED lights up for 10 seconds. Blue for A Long Way Home, Red for Building Jumper and Yellow for Ten Years Left.

jamie_c

Very neat, cool idea.

Braydon_SFX

Genius!

jonmulcahy

yea it was fun. The next step is to buy a 16x32 RGB led panel to have scrolling text. I'll have my own stock ticker for my games
https://learn.adafruit.com/32x16-32x32-rgb-led-matrix

jonmulcahy

here's a quick preview of how it works. I simulated a download of Ten Years Left:

MentalDonkeyGames

Very cool!

jonmulcahy

if you want to make this thing light up, download these two games, they are both free

A Long Way Home
http://www.amazon.com/iceberg-apps-Long-Way-Home/dp/B00UG15ECM/ref=sr_1_1?s=mobile-apps&ie=UTF8&qid=1433868397&sr=1-1&keywords=a+long+way+home

Building Jumper
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/building-jumper/id940165043?mt=8

Hopscotch

@jonmulcahy said:
if you want to make this thing light up, download these two games, they are both free

Now that is THE sneakiest advertising I have seen so far!

Great project @jonmulcahy!

jonmulcahy

@Hopscotch said:

Haha

sebmat86

Hah! How cool is that?!?

jonmulcahy

it's been lighting up all morning, although not nearly as much as I would have hoped but then again, I'm tracking apps that have been out and released for months!

gingagaming

Love it!

jamie_c

Would be really fun to have the visual feedback, I get the feeling I'd start to spend too much time watching it though!

jonmulcahy

@jamie_c said:
Would be really fun to have the visual feedback, I get the feeling I'd start to spend too much time watching it though!

yea i have it mounted right under my monitor at work right now, so i catch it out of the corner of my eye. With the scrolling ticket it will be a little more distracting

WarpSpeed

This is super cool. I'll have to try and set up my Raspberry Pi to to the same thing, but wait, I need to get an app on the store first . Soon come.

gamestudent

Fun! Great way to celebrate getting lots of downloads I bet! How long until Ten Years Left is released?

Lovejoy

What happens when the game is downloaded more than once before the 10 seconds is up? Does it just stay light up say 20 or 30 seconds?

jonmulcahy

@gamestudent said:
Fun! Great way to celebrate getting lots of downloads I bet! How long until Ten Years Left is released?

Thanks, Hopefully this summer!

jonmulcahy

@Lovejoy said:
What happens when the game is downloaded more than once before the 10 seconds is up? Does it just stay light up say 20 or 30 seconds?

Right now that's not really a problem these are old games, a long way home gets around 100-200 a day, and the other one is much less.

My plan is to pickup the rgb matrix I linked to above and code it to show how many new downloads like a stock ticker, it'll show something like this:

A long way home: 9560 (+123) | building jumper: 4327 (+0)

robertkdale

Wow!

neoman

Sweet as

Socks

Brilliant !

jonmulcahy

thanks! it's been a fun experiment. It's been going off every few minutes. very cool to watch

GeorgeGS

I feel like it needs a lot more wires and maybe some vacuum tubes for more mad scientist cred.

jonmulcahy

@GeorgeGS said:
I feel like it needs a lot more wires and maybe some vacuum tubes for more mad scientist cred.

that would be very awesome, display the current downloads in nixie tubes

gingagaming

I would be interested in having you build me a custom one of these if your interested Jon. Ill drop you a PM.

Lovejoy

@jonmulcahy I would look into perhaps a patent for this, there may be a demand for it. Protect your invention.

jonmulcahy

@Lovejoy said:
jonmulcahy I would look into perhaps a patent for this, there may be a demand for it. Protect your invention.

that would be awesome, but i don't think this is really a patentable idea. While it is customized for this application, the concept is pretty basic and there are a great many tutorials on it already. I've seen people use the same foundation to display how many hits on a website.

it would be pretty awesome though

jonmulcahy

@gingagaming said:
I would be interested in having you build me a custom one of these if your interested Jon. Ill drop you a PM.

I replied to your PM, when I have this whole thing completed with the RGB matrix as the output I'm planning on putting together a tutorial so anyone can do the same. I'm ordering the part today , just trying to decide how big to go.

ookami007

That's cool... I built something similar... a red led lit up every time my ex-wife had a bad thought about me... and a yellow led lit up every time I had a negative thought about her... I don't think it worked tho... the led's were always on...

Go figure...

jonmulcahy

@ookami007 said:
That's cool... I built something similar... a red led lit up every time my ex-wife had a bad thought about me... and a yellow led lit up every time I had a negative thought about her... I don't think it worked tho... the led's were always on...

Go figure...

haha