Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #146

Our resident retro-gaming expert KG Orphanides has spent much time perfecting the art of attaching floppy disks and CD-ROMs to Raspberry Pi 5. When KG suggested a retro horror gaming feature for our October issue, we couldn't say no. The lure of revisiting multimedia classics such as Alone in the Dark and Phantasmagoria was too much to resist, and we hope you enjoy reading our spooky trip down memory lane. Meanwhile, Rob has chosen ten creative Halloween projects. So if you fancy building something special to scare trick-or-treaters, be sure to scope it out. This month's magazine has been a lot of fun to write. We hope you're enjoying our HackSpace integration. There's far too much inside the next 132 pages to outline everything, but I especially enjoyed the LEGO…

On 19 August, our flagship Raspberry Pi 5 family gained a new member. Priced at just $50/£47, the new 2GB variant continues our mission to bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience. It's been a little over ten months since we launched Raspberry Pi 5. In many ways, this is the product that finally delivered on the original Raspberry Pi dream: an affordable general-purpose desktop computer, indistinguishable from a traditional PC for most users, and bundled with all the tools and collateral required for a beginner to go from “hello, world” to a career in engineering. Raspberry Pi 5 is on the order of 150 times as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi that we launched back in 2012. Much of that performance increase comes from clever engineering,…

“I have never worked with a company that was so open and receptive about chip security” In early 2024, the stars aligned, and we got the honour of helping make a DEF CON badge. This is all thanks to our design partner friends at Entropic (entropicengineering.com) and the fantastic badge team at DEF CON (defcon.org) for trusting us to get silicon ready in time to build 30,000 badges. It was tight… but we made it happen! The launch was amazing. We were able to give 30,000 DEF CON attendees zero-day access to our brand new chip, RP2350 (magpi.cc/rp2350), as well as a really cool gaming badge that runs a bare-metal GBA emulator made by our talented friend Dmitry Grinberg (dmitry.gr). Double your fun! RP2350 is a dual-CPU, dual-architecture microcontroller. It…

“You can dive into development quickly and efficiently” A few months back, we quietly dropped the Pico VSCode project on GitHub. It didn't take long before the feedback started pouring in. Since then, we've been listening and tweaking. Now, we're excited to officially unveil the public beta of the Raspberry Pi Pico Visual Studio Code Extension. So, what exactly is Pico VSCode? It's a Microsoft Visual Studio Code extension designed to make your life easier when creating, developing, and debugging projects for Raspberry Pi Pico-series boards. Whether you're a total beginner or a seasoned pro, this tool is here to help you dive into Pico development with confidence and ease. If you've ever tried to set up an embedded development environment, you know it's no small feat. Beginners often find…

MAKER Cambridge engineering student Louis spent an incredible summer at Raspberry Pi HQ building all sorts of projects in the dedicated maker space. magpi.cc/pixieclock Maker and engineering undergraduate Louis Wood first encountered Raspberry Pi while looking for a low-cost microcontroller that could be programmed with Python for an A-level project. Inspiring plenty of envy, he's just spent six whole weeks ensconced in Raspberry Pi HQ's very own maker space building a range of Raspberry Pi projects including the LEGO Card Shuffler. Basing it around the LEGO Build HAT (magpi.cc/buildhat) helped him evolve and improve upon a design he and his Queen's College Cambridge university friends Lucas Hoffman and Emily Wang devised. The card shuffler idea was their response to a design and build challenge based around a LEGO NXT system that…

01 The card shuffler was built using LEGO pieces from a Spike educational kit, but standard LEGO pieces and different motors could also be used. 02 Affix the Build HAT to Raspberry Pi, and attach the motors to the ports on the LEGO Build HAT. Attach your assembled card shuffler to a mains or portable power supply. 03 Use a second device to set up Raspberry Pi for headless control using SSH. Place your playing cards face down in the two card bays, then run the MicroPython script to start shuffling them.…