Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #110

As time goes on, I’m increasingly becoming a militant 'right to repair' advocate. I think it’s right to fix and improve things, rather than chucking them in the bin and buying afresh. It makes financial sense to build your gadgets or repair them, and you can improve classic kit with Raspberry Pi technology. With Raspberry Pi, you can make an outrageous idea work. You can’t buy a dog translator, cat speedometer, or snore detector. With Raspberry Pi, your ideas – or the wild ideas of other makers – become reality. And, it makes sense to know how something works. Build something with your own hands and it’s truly yours. Your Smart Gadgets feature (page 30) has all the information you need to transform classic devices into super-smart widgets, and build…

Raspberry Pi has launched the next generation of its documentation that can be viewed today (magpi.cc/documentation). Writing on the Raspberry Pi blog (magpi.cc/bringondocs), Alasdair Allan, Head of Documentation at Raspberry Pi, says: “The documentation repository itself had been left to grow organically. When I arrived, it needed to be restructured, and a great deal of non-Raspberry Pi specific documentation needed to be removed, while other areas were underserved and needed to be expanded.” Replacing Markdown The new documentation design “comes from the same team of folks that built the excellent PDF-based documentation for Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040.” The PDF documentation for RP2040 and Raspberry Pi Pico was built off an Asciidoc-based toolchain, and “we knew from the outset that we’d want to migrate the current Markdown-based documentation to Asciidoc.…

Mission Space Lab and Mission Zero are back once again: the challenge where teams of students send code to the ISS (International Space Station) to be run on a couple of Raspberry Pi systems that are installed on the station. These Astro Pi were launched in 2015, though, and are long due an upgrade. Not only will the new Astro Pi computers use a Raspberry Pi 4, they’ll also receive a powered-up Sense HAT and more sensors and features for students to use. This includes a High Quality Camera, Coral machine learning accelerator, colour and luminosity sensor, and a passive infrared sensor. This joins the current sensors of a gyroscope; an accelerometer; a magnetometer; and humidity, temperature, and pressure sensors. “The new hardware makes it possible for teams to design…

After hearing about the science prizewinning LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, magpi.cc/ligo) six PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh decided to see whether they could emulate the idea. LIGO detects the gravitational waves in space caused by celestial objects colliding and predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity. Understanding space has always interested Husni Almoubayyed, so he was attracted to the idea of something that can monitor gravitational effects “stretching and contracting space around us on a very tiny scale”. While there was no expectation of building their own LIGO device, not least because of the expense involved, Husni and fellow students wanted to help communicate to a wide audience how LIGO works. miniLIGO is designed to be a “simplistic and affordable” prototype mimicking the…

“It’s great at detecting whether there is or is not a package, but it also sometimes recognises my cats as packages!” Many of us are increasingly ordering goods online, with the consequence that more and more parcels and boxes are landing on doorsteps everywhere. From a security aspect, it can be a little worrying when our precious new purchases are left in plain sight waiting for us to return home. A fun and light-hearted project by Canadian maker Ryder shows one unique way of handling it. Flour power Following the theft of a package from his porch earlier in the year, Ryder decided to take action. “It had never happened to me before and I was a little frustrated,” he recalls. “I’d been doing some image classification work at the…

Known for his robotic creations, popular YouTuber James Bruton is also a keen Iron Man cosplayer, and his latest invention would surely impress Tony Stark: an intelligent prosthetic arm that can move naturally and autonomously, depending on the wearer’s body posture and limb movements. “It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I’ve never actually attempted properly,” James tells us. “I thought it would be good to have a work stream of something that could be useful.” Motion capture suit To obtain the body movement data on which to base the arm’s movements, James considered using a brain computer, but this would be unreliable without embedding electrodes in his head! So, he instead opted to train it with machine learning. For this he created a motion capture…