Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #121

E lectricity is fantastic stuff! It's used to power labour-saving gizmos, light up our streets, move our cars, and perform everyday miracles that would seem the stuff of magic to our ancestors. Understanding electronics is half of the code and digitalmaking ethos that underpins Raspberry Pi. And few devices are better for learning electronics than Pico W. Designed to sit right at the heart of electronic projects, Pico is a low-power microcontroller development board with 40 connections on the side – you can connect Pico to just about anything. Learning electronics is a rite of passage for new Raspberry Pi aficionados. Start by lighting up lights, then create code that responds to buttons, wire up sensors, pull in information from the internet, and build wild creations (page 30). Getting an…

MAKER Maximilian Kern A hardware developer based in Germany, who likes to do DIY projects in his spare time, including hardware, software and mechanical design. magpi.cc/zerobug In issue 119 (magpi.cc/119), we reviewed the intimidating SpiderPi, a big hexapod robot that tormented our editor's poor cat. Shortly after the release of the issue, Maximilian Kern emailed us about the one he'd created himself, called ZeroBug, appropriately powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero. “Zero is in charge of the input methods,” Maximilian explains. “It runs a custom web interface and an instance of Pygame. This makes it possible to control the robot using a mouse, keyboard, multitouch, or simply an Xbox gamepad… Instead of specialised robotics servos, this robot uses inexpensive micro servos. Inside its 3D-printed frame there is just enough room…

MAKER Kevin McAleer Kevin McAleer makes robots, brings them to Life with code, and makes videos about them on YouTube. magpi.cc/kevinmcaleer In the early 2000s, Big Mouth Billy Bass – a kitschy, 3D plastic fish mounted in a picture frame that appears to sing, as well as writhe around – became such an in-demand item that there's reputedly one hanging proudly above the grand piano at the Queen's Balmoral residence. YouTuber, and Raspberry Pi enthusiast, Kevin McAleer relates this apocryphal tale while introducing his latest Raspberry Pi project: a Pico W-controlled update to the tuneful animatronic sea creature, hosted at mouthpi.co. Kevin first fell in love with computing when he became the proud owner of a ZX Spectrum back in 1982. He went on to study computer science. He had…

MAKER Brian Corteil Brian is a maker and amateur robot designer with a “toy age” of eight. He's a member of Cambridge Makespace. @CannonFodder Warning! Moving parts Be careful with objects that spin at high speeds and do not touch them Zoetropes were invented by a mathematician called William Horner in 1834 and they proved to be an effective way to produce animations. A set of still images would line the inside of a rotating drum, and viewers would peer through narrow slits in the side. The speed at which they passed the eyes would produce an illusion of movement. As the years went by, the technique was refined and zoetropes remain as much fun today as they did nearly 190 years ago. As if to prove the concept still…

MAKER Dr James Scott, Jeremy Taylor, Jim Rowe Dr James Scott, a geologist at the University of Otago, and Jeremy Taylor set up the Fireballs Aotoreoa meteor tracking programme with input from Jim Rowe of the UK Fireball Alliance. fireballs.nz The excitingly named Fireballs Aotearoa (fireballs.nz) is an ambitious research project that aims to make good on the Global Meteor Network's aim of ensuring no meteor is undetected. The GMN's worldwide meteor and meteorite tracking endeavours already had sites spread across Europe and the US, but few in the Southern Hemisphere. With international news coverage of a fireball over southern England in March 2021 that was successfully tracked by citizen scientists, there has been a significant increase in the number of meteor cameras in the UK and beyond. A Fireballs…

MAKER Juha “A Finnish middleaged guy,” Juha runs the Brick Experiment Channel on YouTube, dedicated to building and experimenting with LEGO Technic bricks. He has worked for over ten years as a software engineer. magpi.cc/becyoutube Keeping an inverted pendulum aloft is a popular challenge in control theory – which deals with the behaviour of dynamical systems – and requires precise motion control to prevent it from falling over. It's something maker and YouTuber Juha, of the Brick Experiment Channel, learned about in courses he did 20 years ago, which inspired him to try it with LEGO and Raspberry Pi. Made of LEGO bricks, his inverted pendulum requires active control to stay upright. A ‘reaction wheel’, also made from LEGO, is mounted on the pendulum and attached to a motor controlled…