Mike Fuller

The Mission Pinball Framework ( http://missionpinball.org ) supports unittests ( http://developer.missionpinball.org/en/latest/testing/index.html ) which is super awesome.  We all should be writing and running unittests for the code we write, even if thats just writing yaml files for MPF. First off running the unittests in your local development environment should be as simple as a single command: Python -m unittest I do not recommend away from runing the tests locally, in fact I will in the process of explaining how to use Bitbucket Pipelines ( https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines ) I will give you a quick script that you can use to ensure the code your about to commit "should" pass in pipelines. So if we can run the test locally why use pipelines? Well humans are forgetful, its likely over the long period of time that I will be building a pinball machine I am going to forget to run tests so I want a way that ensures they get run and what is easier tha...

If you follow any other custom pinball blogs you will realise that building a custom pinball machine is a long process, with many of life events halting progress. As I have two little ones that will always take priority over building a pinball machine, it is totally inevitable that I will have down periods. Which will only ever lead me to forget where things are up to and what items remain. With this in mind I have decided I should use tools to track my progress. It is no secret that I work for Atlassian and while I use JIRA day to day to track my work I don't need something so structured to track things at home. Since we acquired Trello at the start of the year it makes perfect sense for me to use the tools we make at work. Trello has the benefit of unstructured workflows, providing a simple to use Web and Mobile interface to just do what is needed, keep track of things. The first thing I setup was the lists (or swimlanes for those familiar with sprint style agile develop...

First off the computer I am using is an Intel NUC . I got the NUC5CPYH with a 120GB SSD and 4GB RAM, which I hope will be enough power but should at least get me developing and I can upgrade to a bigger unit in the future if needed. My intention is to develop from my primary iMac or my laptop and use remote connection (VNC) to access the NUC. This blog is to outline some of the process I went through in setting up my NUC and environment to work with it. I am going to use Linux (Ubuntu) and to keep the OS as light as possible I will use the Xubuntu variant as this installs the XFCE window manager by default which is lighter than the normal Unity Window Manager. TIP: There are good docs on setting up Mission Pinball here:  http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/latest/install/xubuntu.html  However I went a little off script in setting up Mission Pinball Framework as I wasn't too keen on their installer, it installs the python packages into the system python instead of creat...