Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #120

I still remember my first robot: ‘Tyres’, named after the cyclist in Spaced. To this day, he's a good bot! Building a robot from scratch is one of the most rewarding Raspberry Pi projects. So many people tell us that building a robot sounds incredibly complex. But it's really not as hard as you first think. Take one Raspberry Pi (or Pico), add a couple of motors, mix in a couple of wheels, and whizz it all up with a battery, and you will have a tin box whirring around the room in no time. Of course, you can take it from there, and modern robot parts can become incredibly detailed. We've built all manner of walking, dancing, scuttling, and grabbing robots. All are controlled by code. Raspberry Pi is…

MAKER Martin Spendiff & Vanessa Bradley Martin is a mathematical modeller who left the UK for Switzerland, and a fan of FOSS and tech that serves users, rather than the people who made it, Vanessa is new to coding and a constant source of weird and good ideas. veeb.ch Readers may remember a fantastic Teasmade project that we featured back in The MagPi issue #114 (magpi.cc/114), made by Swiss-based team Martin Spendiff and Vanessa Bradley. Well, while browsing their YouTube channel, we noticed that - in a new upcycling project - they have taken a vintage railway clock and transformed it with a Pico. Naturally, we wanted to know what made it tick. Old timer “We bought a railway station clock from a flea market and were a bit crestfallen…

MAKER Daniele Giuliani Daniele's passion for technology began while tinkering with Raspberry Pi at school in Italy, and he now holds an MSc in Computer Science. magpi.cc/picomemcard Warning! Cut Safely This project uses a sharp knife to cut open the original memory card. Watch over children when using sharp knives. magpi.cc/knifesafety Software engineer Daniele Giuliani missed playing some of the games on his original PlayStation, but quickly discovered that boxed and unused PS memory cards are hard to find and far more expensive than they used to retail for. With no guarantee that used official cards - or counterfeit Chinese ones - will perform well, Daniele decided to put his coding skills to good use and create an alternative to Sony memory cards so he could continue playing his old…

MAKER John Calhoun John started programming on a Mac, wrote shareware and commercial games, and worked for Apple for 26 years, magpi.cc/systemsix You may have heard of John Calhoun. Aside from working as a software engineer for Apple for 26 years until he retired last autumn, he’s well-known for writing a string of games for the Apple Mac, among them the popular 1988 shareware title, Glider. More recently, he’s been causing a bit of a stir thanks to a different kind of fruit-related computer. By connecting a Raspberry Pi 3 to a 5.83-inch e-ink display, he’s created a fresh spin on a classic Mac, called SystemsSix - a modern homage to the System 6 operating system released 31 years ago. Dubbed a “desk accessory”, it displays the local weather, a…

MAKER James Brown James lives in Wellington, New Zealand, has a background in games and graphics programming, and creates interactive exhibitions. @ancientjames @mastodon.social Alert! CRT This project uses a CRT television. Be careful of high voltages when working with CRT screens. magpi.cc/crt There’s “something wonderfully unsettling” about being stared at by your own disembodied eye, comments master of understatement James Brown. James came up with the idea for his VK-Pocket Camcorder while working on the face-tracking feature for an interactive exhibit, and realised one of the debug tools was showing parts of his face as it detected them. “I had a little viewfinder CRT salvaged from a junk shop camcorder, so I decided to wrap up that experience in a little self-contained gizmo, and style it after the Voight-Kampff machine…

MAKER Kian Ryan Kian tinkers with old computers and tries to build new things. Sometimes at the same time. kianryan.co.uk It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that The MagPi loves to see makers tinkering with retro tech. Bringing old machines back to life is humongous fun, allowing us to tap into nostalgia while seeing how far devices of a bygone age can be pushed in the modern world. With Kian Ryan’s latest project, a Psion 5MX personal digital assistant, popular in the late 1990s, has been turned into a portable Linux terminal, thanks to the addition of a Raspberry Pi Zero computer. The idea grew off the back of another project. “I was attempting to connect a RC2014 - a Z80-based homebrew computer - to the Psion and was having…