• Find games for macOS with local multiplayer like Big Boy Boxing, Micro Entertainment Pack: Micro Chess, AmongJS, Turret Jumper Wars!, Bottom Line on itch.io, the indie game hosting marketplace.
• Complete teaching solutions give you and your students the best tools for learning. Integrated hardware, software, and curriculum systems allow students to record data from their own bodies, animal, or tissue preps to learn principles of life science physiology.

As part of my personal interest in different areas of technology, I have decided to go a bit deeper in the low power consumption microcontroller boards world that will (hopefully) leads me to a better understanding of practical implementation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) concept.

V1.3: -Made the game less harsh for players on their first run -Made the dialogue blips a little quieter v1.2: -Fixed some dialogue strings to prevent text hopping -Reworked some notification areas -Exupery sighs -Experimental mac release (not entirely sure if it works) v1.1: -Added a fix for a visual glitch thanks to. Is an FPS Puzzle Platformer created as a university project. I unfortunately didn't get past the turret swapping section in the first level, i'm unsure whether that is a bug, but as '4 levels' is mentioned in your description, i assume that it is something of the sort.

In this article I tried to document my beginner’s journey to learn how the new Raspberry Pi Pico board works and interacts with other devices. Most articles and guides I have seen assume that you know things that (I believe) a beginner usually don’t know (at least, I didn’t), so I will try to explain a few things that helped me to better understand what I was doing and fill some gaps between hardware configuration and programming languages (MicroPython in this case).

Requirements

These are the required items to complete this guide.

• Pi Pico – preferably a pre-soldered version, otherwise (like myself) you will need to solder the pins yourself.
• MicroUSB cable – make sure it’s a proper cable for data transfer, otherwise your computer will not communicate with Pi Pico board.
• Breadboard – a half sized breadboard (400 points) is what I’ve used here.
• Cables/Wire Jumpers – cables are a good start, but wire jumpers keep your breadboard tidy.
• OLED Display – I’ve used a 0.91 cm (0.56 ft) 128×32 SDD1306 model. Make sure that yours is at least SDD1306. Same as Pi Pico board, pre-soldered pins will help here.
• Thonny installed on your computer (https://thonny.org/). Version 3.3.3 or later is required to support Pi Pico.

Note: If you don’t want to test an OLED display, only the two first items are required to install MicroPython and complete the internal LED quick test.

If you are wondering how much you are going to spend with this exercise, I paid €23.05 for all the items on a Spanish online store. I will put the links here if you are interested.

• Pi Pico Start Kit – tinyurl.com/y6edmoba
• Wire jumper pack – tinyurl.com/y6sel84j
• OLED Display – tinyurl.com/yykx2l2m

Please note that neither the Pi Pico and OLED display in the list above come pre-soldered.

Installing MicroPython

The first thing we have to do is install MicroPython onto Pi Pico. Before plugging the USB cable, hold the BOOTSEL button located on the top of you Pi Pico and then connect the USB cable. After about 3 seconds, release the BOOTSEL button. The picture below shows where the BOOTSEL button is located.

You should see your Pi Pico as a removable USB storage in your computer. As I’m using a Mac, I can see it in Finder.

Now start Thonny app, and it will automatically ask you to install MycroPython firmware on Pi Pico. Just go ahead and finish the installation.

After finishing the firmware installation, you should see a MicroPython REPL prompt in the shell box.

Quick Internal LED Test

If you want to run a quick test and check if the communication with the board is working properly, copy and paste the following lines into the shell box.

If the green led on top of your Pi Pico board is on, then the test works.

Wiring Information

Before we start our wiring task, it would be good to have a quick overview of the pins we are going to use from Pi Pico. The board contains 40 pins and the picture below shows which ones we are going to use for this guide.

Here is a brief explanation for each selected pin:

• Pin 40 (VBUS) – this is the the pin that takes power directly from the micro USB port and it runs at 5v. Pin 36 could also be used as the OLED display we are using also works with 3.3v.
• Pin 3 (GND) – the ground connection to complete the circuit connected to the power source (any other GND pin could also be used)
• Pin 11 (I2C0 SDA / GP8) – this is the channel to send and receive data.
• Pin 12 (I2C0 SDL / GP9) – the clock signal.

With Pin 11 and 12 we can notice that I2C (Inter-Itegrated Circuit) is the standard used here to communicate with the OLED display. Pi Pico has 2 I2C buses, that is why we can see both I2C0 and I2C1 notations in the diagram above.

The GPxx notation is for General-purpose input/output (GPIO) along with the respective pin number (xx) which should not be confused with the physical pin numbers mentioned above. We will see later in the coding section that our code will refer to pins by function. E.g. Pin(9) is actually pin GP9 (Pin 11), not the physical Pin 9.

The wiring diagram below shows how we connect the OLED display to Pi Pico.

After finishing the wiring exercise, your prototype should look something like this.

The Indoor Thermometer program

As this is a quickstart guide, I’m not going into the details of the code. I believe there are enough comments in the code to explain what it is doing. I just would like to mention a few things:

• The code imports the SS1306 driver, so it will not work if your OLED display uses a different driver.
• In line 10 we are specifying the GPIO pins for SDA (data) and SCL (clock), as mentioned in the Wiring Information section above.
• As commented in the code, we are using an internal sensor to measure the temperature.

Open Thonny then copy and pate the code below.

When you click save for the first time, Thonny will ask where you want to save it. Just choose ‘Raspberry Pi Pico’, name the file ‘main.py’ and save it. Now try to run it and see if it works by pressing F5 or clicking on the green play button.

You may be a bit disappointed that it didn’t work, and you got the following message:

Well, it is because we haven’t included the SS1306 driver library (and most of the guides I’ve seen don’t include this part). Luckily this if very simple with Thonny (I didn’t have the same experience with VSCode and PyCharm). On the menu, click on ‘Tools’ and select ‘Manage Packages…’.

Search for ‘SSD1306’ and a few results should come back from PyPI.

Select ‘micropython-ssd1306’ and then click on ‘Install’ button. Once finished, you will see the ssd1306 package on the left side. Click on it and see the driver added to the /lib folder.

Close the package management window and run it again. Now you should see a successful execution informing the IC2 Address and Configuration.

This is because Thonny automatically downloaded the package and added it to our codebase. Now we can finally see the working prototype!

Hello, and again, welcome to the TCRF wiki article pertaining to unused assets within the computer entertainment software known as 'Portal'. We hope your brief detention in the relaxation vault has been a pleasant one. Your specimen has been processed and we are now ready to begin the article proper. Before we start, however, keep in mind that although fun and learning are the primary goals of TCRF activities, serious injuries may occur.

• 1Unused Textures
  • 1.8Unused Map Textures
• 3Unused Dialogue
• 6Unused ASCII Art
• 8Half-Life 2 Leftovers

Turret Jumper (prototype) Mac Os X

Unused Textures

BLU Briefcase

Present in materials/models/flag is the Team Fortress 2 BLU briefcase texture, apparently misplaced here.

fixed_portal_border

The early fixed portal border texture, seen in many pre-release screenshots, remains in the game files in the portal/materials/signage/ directory.

Red Portal

A red-colored portal, present in portal/materials/models/portals/portal-red-color.vtf. This is the color the orange portal had during development, and if you turn on the closed captions the message 'Red Portal Open' will appear whenever you shoot an orange one. This misnaming is present in all languages.

To enable it in-game (replacing the orange portal), modify portal/materials/models/portals/portalstaticoverlay_2.vmt to read '$PortalColorTexture' 'models/portals/portal-red-color' instead of '$PortalColorTexture' 'models/portals/portal-orange-color', although the particles around the portal will stay orange.

Alternate Portal Particles

Present in the game's particle files are a different particle system for portals that was never used in-game. It can be enabled by running the game with the -tools argument.

'Sparta' Sign

This odd texture is present in portal/materials/models/props_facemovie/wet_floor_sign, without a matching model in the game files. Files used in the 'props_facemovie' folder were originally intended to feature in a Source Filmmaker video, and a matching model for the sign can be found in the Source Filmmaker files, albeit with a plain texture.

• Texture from the Portal files

• The sign with the SPARTA! texture

• The sign with the plain texture from Source Filmmaker

White Phone

There is an unused skingroup texture of Aperture Science's emergency phone prop, colored white.

• Texture from the Portal files

• When applied to the phone and receiver models

v_portalgun2

Present in the portal/materials/models/weapons/v_models/v_portalgun/ directory is a texture for a much earlier Portal Gun, as seen in this video.

Unused Map Textures

A couple of concrete and plastic textures that never got used.

• concrete_bts_floor001b.vtf

• concrete_bts_wall001a.vtf

• plastic_light001a.vtf

• plastic_light001b.vtf

This texture, in portal/materials/nature, apparently would have appeared as the surface of toxic slime as seen from below. The material simply reuses the top texture for both sides.

Overlays

A few overlays, a poster and a couple of oil stains, also never got used. stain_oil_06.vtf lacks an alpha channel.

• aperture_poster001a.vtf

• stain_oil_02.vtf

• stain_oil_06.vtf

Skyboxes

An odd skybox showing metal test chamber walls with glowing orange holes.

• bts_custom_cubemapup.vtf

• bts_custom_cubemapbk.vtf

• bts_custom_cubemapft.vtf

• bts_custom_cubemaplf.vtf

• bts_custom_cubemaprt.vtf

• bts_custom_cubemapdn.vtf

Another odd skybox showing the first Xen map from Half-Life. The map escape_01.bsp is in fact set to use this, but the map doesn't contain any skybox brushes, so it is never rendered.

• sky_escape_01_up.vtf

• sky_escape_01_bk.vtf

• sky_escape_01_ft.vtf

• sky_escape_01_lf.vtf

• sky_escape_01_rt.vtf

• sky_escape_01_dn.vtf

Unseen Portal Gun Viewmodel Hand

In the actual Portal Gun's viewmodel, there's a non-animated hand without textures. Unfortunately, Chell's hand texture's UV mapping does not match the VTF meaning the texture does not align with her arm.

Unused Dialogue

GLaDOS

Turret Jumper (prototype) Mac Os Download

Turrets

Unused Sounds

Tim Larkin

If you noclip to the end sequence, you will find a radio NPC named Tim Larkin. Larkin created the ending cinematic music/sound, and this NPC controls the playing of those sounds. It was named after him in his honor. Apparently, Tim didn't know about this!

Unused ASCII Art

Various pieces of ASCII art go unused in the credits.txt and, by proxy, in the ending credits' ASCII art section.

RADIO

COMPANION_CUBE

LIGHTBULB

MECH_ARM

PERSONALITY_SPHERE

Unused Subtitles

A few unused subtitles can be found in the closed captions files. They are translated into different languages. The scripts/npc_sounds_aperture_ai.txt labels them as BONUS REWARD SOUNDS, and reveals they were to be spoken by GLaDOS. Some of these correspond to lines which were are garbled or cut-off in the final game, while others are for lines that go unused or are only present in the leak.

Half-Life 2 Leftovers

There is a folder titled 'hl2' filled with Half Life 2 assets, mostly there due to reusing some assets and possibly not bothering to clean out irrelevant data.

Half-Life 2-Style Testing Equipment

The prefabs included in the Source SDK Episode One tools with the folder 'prefabs' (having three folders inside, one which is for Portal) feature old versions of map elements in Half-Life 2 style. Portal used Half-Life 2 assets in the early stages of development as placeholders.