Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #128

Learning to code can be a life-changing experience. Computers are useful things, and learning how to get under the hood is - in itself - pretty rewarding, and there’s plenty of demand for coders worldwide. But beyond that, learning to program teaches you how to think. You learn how to break down complex tasks and put things in order. It teaches you how to solve seemingly impossible problems. Our Learn to Code with Python feature (page 44) can help you out on this journey. I hope you take it. You’ll also discover excellent Computer Science resources in this issue (page 80), including CS50 and MITx (both of which helped me immeasurably when I got serious about coding). Blending code with hardware is what The MagPi is all about. And you…

Remember those new cameras we launched way back in the dawn of… January? [see magpi.cc/126 - Ed], We have another one for you - and this time we’re getting specialised We’re launching something a little different: the Raspberry Pi Global Shutter Camera, available now at $50 (magpi.cc/globalshuttercam). Built around Sony’s l.6-megapixel IMX296 sensor, the Global Shutter Camera is able to capture rapid motion without introducing rolling shutter artefacts. This makes it a great fit for sports photography and machine vision applications, where even small amounts of distortion can seriously degrade inference performance. Rolling shutters, global shutters Every camera we’ve released to date, from 2014’s Camera Module 1 to our High Quality Camera and beyond, has used a rolling shutter sensor. These sensors have a two-dimensional array of light-sensitive pixels, which…

Raspberry Pi is introducing Raspberry Pi Pico Windows Installer, a simple solution to install everything you need to develop for Raspberry Pi Pico, and for other RP2040based boards, using C or C++ on Windows. The Raspberry Pi Pico C SDK (magpi.cc/picocsdk) can initially seem quite daunting. There are a lot of moving parts to install before you can blink your first LED on, and then off again, especially if you want proper debugging using something like our new Debug Probe (magpi.cc/debugprobe). While there has been a ‘one-click’ solution (magpi.cc/picosetup) to install the toolchain on a Raspberry Pi since launch - see Chapter l of the Getting Started guide (magpi.cc/gettingstartedpico) installing the toolchain on other platforms, like macOS or Windows, has always been a little more difficult. When we launched Raspberry…

MAKER magpi.cc/motorizedcamgit Electronics engineer Vito counts astronomy and photography among his interests. After using Raspberry Pi a few years ago as part of his role in the medical sphere, he realised it would fit rather neatly with his hobbies too. This led to him setting up the YouTube channel Vigasan (magpi.cc/vigasanyt) to showcase his projects. The Heavy Pan Tilt System addresses a common issue with astrophotography: the need for a setup robust enough to take a hefty digital SLR camera and have it pan smoothly across the night sky without juddering or losing either focus or the object in the viewfinder. Commercial options tend to be “quite expensive astronomical mounts,” so Vito set about create his own version using his own mechanical designs and software to automate object tracking. Raspberry…

01 Creating a motorised pan tilt system in order to take videos and photos using heavy cameras and lenses requires considerable torque, necessitating the use of stepper motors and a pulley and weights system to reduce the motor size required. 02 Vito designed and laser-cut the aluminium frames. These precision parts and other I3D-printed elements were designed to fit the two STM L6470 stepper motors and belts, which Raspberry Pi 4 controls. 03 Vito used Qt framework software and OpenCV libraries with Raspberry Pi OS for object detection and computer vision tasks. Everything can now be controlled via Bluetooth and an iPhone - see magpi.cc/motorizedcamgit for more details.…

MAKER magpi.cc/wordclock If you want to know the time, there are many methods available to you. Perhaps you’d like to glance at a digital or analogue clock or watch. Maybe you’d like to ask your favourite virtual assistant to read it out loud. If you’re feeling bold, you consult a sundial, a time ball or a merkhet. Or, if you’re Christopher Hall, you could use a word clock and see the time as written sentences. Word clocks are not new but they sure are fun, and Christopher’s entry goes further than most. As well as telling the time, it announces holidays and birthdays by shining LED lights behind specific letters and numbers on a custom-made panel. Everything is controlled by a Raspberry Pi computer. “When I thought of the project,…