Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #114

Ilove programming. I tapped out my first piece of code on a ZX-81 computer in junior school and I’ve been smitten ever since. Code controls what happens on the screen in front of you and increasingly in the world around you. Programming is an engaging process that requires thought and rewards patience. Code is good for the mind. Here at The MagPi, we see evidence of Raspberry Pi computers making the world a better place every day. Raspberry Pi brings together code with projects: weather stations, video games, robots, websites, and server systems. The possibilities with a smattering of code are mind-blowing. Which, perhaps, is why it’s often so hard to get started. But it shouldn’t be! This month, we’ve put together a feature on Practical Programming – your starter…

Many people have a keen interest in astronomy, but before Chris de Moor created a project that’s truly out of this world, he didn’t count himself as being among them. “I didn’t know anything about astronomy and that sort of stuff,” he freely admits. Yet after visiting the Eise Eisinga Planetarium in Franeker in the Netherlands, he was inspired. “Eise Eisinga completed an orrery in his house in 1781,” Chris says, of the oldest working orrery in the world, created by the Frisian amateur astronomer. “I saw it on the ceiling and thought I wanted one just like that, thinking it would fit perfectly in my living room. At first I believed it would be a weekend project – a simple art piece – until I decided it should work…

01 Eise Eisinga spent seven years creating his orrery in the 18th century. Bought by King William I of the Netherlands in 1818, it was very detailed and also kept track of the phases of the moon. Credit: Erik Zachte, Wikipedia 02 Chris de Moor opted for a simpler system because of the smaller space he had. The outer planets are connected to 3D-printed cars running on tracks, controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero. 03 Inner planets Earth and Venus, meanwhile, are connected to a viewing dish that’s mounted to a propeller dish. Mercury is mounted directly on to the stepper motor. It allows for tighter circling.…

Teasmades are machines for automatically making tea. They were hugely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and often placed in bedrooms (for the convenience of having a piping hot cup as soon as you were awoken by the machine’s alarm). The Goblin Teasmade, in particular, is something of an icon in its field. This author fondly remembers her late grandmother’s Teasmade that sat proudly in a guest bedroom, waiting for the odd bed-and-breakfast guest that she occasionally took into her home. Although, we did always wonder the point of it when you still had to get up and go to the kitchen to get some milk from the fridge. But, despite our puzzlement, the Teasmade has basked in a form of legendary glory ever since. The coffee stimulus Hardly surprising…

Mary and Mark McIntyre are so dedicated to astronomy that they had a mini-honeymoon at AstroFarm in France, and timed it so the moonlight wouldn’t affect whether they could spot stars. They even moved halfway across the UK in order to set up home close to an important stargazing spot, at which point they decided to replace their existing meteor tracking setup. They have now built an RMS (Raspberry Pi Meteor Software)-based meteor tracker, one of dozens of astronomy trackers that helped pinpoint the whereabouts of a very rare carbonaceous chondrite meteorite which landed in Somerset in February 2020. Mary and Mark’s previous Raspberry Pi projects included a weather station and an all-sky camera which they used with an analogue meteor camera, and for which they adapted code to display…

The RMS software can be downloaded from magpi.cc/rmswiki, while detailed build instructions are at magpi.cc/rmscamera. You’ll need a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, IP camera or Raspberry Pi HQ Camera, large-capacity microSD card, and an Ethernet connection. 01 Connect the camera via Raspberry Pi’s Ethernet port and a PoE injector, and run the script on Raspberry Pi to configure the camera for night vision. 02 Install the camera in a weatherproof housing on the outside of a building with a good view of the night sky. 03 After the first night’s run, ‘calibrate’ the camera’s field of view against the stars – see the setup guide. After this, it should be set to run automatically every night.…