Before I start on the meat of this post, I have a boast to make: we won another award! We’re so excited at the way the press about Raspberry Pi has been getting recently; I got into the car we’d hired to take us home from the airport yesterday, and the driver lunged into the passenger seat and brought out a copy of Stuff Magazine to show us, with a two-page spread about things you can hack with your Raspberry Pi. Then, last night (at an event we were sadly unable to attend), we won a T3 Award for Innovation of the Year. We’re very proud, very pleased and extremely grateful to all of you who voted to get us onto the shortlist.

Back to the matter in hand. One of the nice things about this mini-tour of US hackspaces that Eben and I have just completed has been the way we’ve met some people we feel we already know well from the forums or from this blog and its comments section. Shea Silverman is one of those people; he’s had a MAME project featured here before, and he’s been helping people in our forums out with their MAME ideas too. Turns out that in real life, he’s a lovely, lovely chap. I spent a long time with Shea, coveting his newest Raspberry Pi hack: a miniature MAME cabinet which, when we saw it, was doing a very smart job of running Street Fighter II on its 2-inch display. I am still feeling terrible about the bit where I got over-enthused and started to walk across the room to show it to someone, forgetting that it was still plugged in at the wall. Happily, Shea has an awesome rugby-tackle on him (for an American). This cabinet is laser-cut using the facilities at FamiLAB, a really impressive hackspace in Orlando, Florida. This machine is running Advmame under the latest Raspbian at 900mhz; Shea will be releasing the SVG files for the cabinet itself soon (he’s planning to upgrade the screen to a 3in one for better visibility).

Shea has written a bit about the evening on his blog. I’m hoping we can return to some of the places we visited on this trip later on – we had an absolute blast on this trip, and really want to see what you all get up to over the next year with your Raspberry Pis!