Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #150

We've made it all the way to issue 150! This is a huge achievement and a testament to the strength of the Raspberry Pi community, the incredible team of writers, and the company itself. I'm slightly in awe of you all! I strongly believe in printed publications and physical products in general. Making hardware is tough; making print magazines is also hard. The stakes are high and you have to think about what you include; and what you leave out. This month, the whole team came together to write about 150 People & Projects (page 42). This massive feature takes up almost a fifth of our magazine and was a labour of love. In it, you'll find all the biggest projects, best people, and brightest shining products of the last…

We first announced Raspberry Pi 5 back in the autumn of 2023, with just two choices of memory density: 4GB and 8GB. Last summer, we released the 2GB variant, aimed at cost-sensitive applications. And now we're launching its bigger sibling, the 16GB variant, priced at $120. Why 16GB, and why now? We're continually surprised by the uses that people find for our hardware. Many of these fit into 8GB (or even 2GB) of SDRAM, but the threefold step up in performance between Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 opens up use cases like large language models and computational fluid dynamics, which benefit from having more storage per core. And while Raspberry Pi OS has been tuned to have low base memory requirements, heavyweight distributions like Ubuntu benefit from additional…

We're proud of the low environmental impact of Raspberry Pi computers. They are small and light, which translates directly into a small upfront carbon footprint for manufacturing, logistics, and disposal. With an idle power consumption in the 2–3 W range, and a fully loaded power consumption of less than 10 W, replacing a legacy x86 PC with a Raspberry Pi typically results in a significant reduction in operating power consumption, and thus ongoing carbon footprint. But while our upfront carbon footprint is small, it is not zero. So we're launching Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credits (magpi.cc/carbonremoval), priced at $4, giving you the option to mitigate the emissions associated with the manufacture and disposal of a modern Raspberry Pi. How does it work? We commissioned Inhabit (inhabit.eco) to conduct an independent…

Ah, the WOPR – or ‘War Operation Plan Response’, for those who enjoy abbreviations that sound like a robot from the future, only less like a friend and more like an overzealous maths teacher. The WOPR is the supercomputer from the 1983 movie WarGames. It doesn't understand sarcasm, it can't sense when it's being pranked, and it certainly doesn't know when it's been told to ‘play a game’ – much like our Maker in Residence, Toby, who built it to delight and entertain all visitors to the Pi Towers Maker Lab. What's inside? • Raspberry Pi 4 (magpi.cc/raspberrypi4) • Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 (magpi.cc/touchdisplay) • 5 V / 30 A power supply (magpi.cc/5v30a) • 615 Adafruit NeoPixels (magpi.cc/neopixels) • Bluetooth speaker A script runs on boot, which twinkles the…

The launch of Raspberry Pi 5 represented a significant change from previous models. Building chips that run faster and use less power, while continuing to support 3.3 V I/O, presents real, exciting challenges. Our solution was to split the main SoC (system on chip) in two – the compute half, and the I/O half – and put a fast interconnect (4-lane PCIe Gen 3) between them. The SoC on Raspberry Pi 5 is the Broadcom BCM2712, and the I/O processor (which used to be known in the PC world as the ‘southbridge’) is Raspberry Pi RP1. Along with all the usual peripherals – USB, I2C, SPI, DMA, and UARTs – RP1 included something a bit more interesting. One of RP2040's distinguishing features was a pair of PIO blocks, deceptively simple…

MAKER Graham Hooley – aka Graham Tinkers – loves to tinker and repair old 8- and 16-bit computers. He shares his passion for them via his YouTube channel. youtube.com/c/grahamtinkers As many computer archivists will confirm, floppy disks don't last forever. Although some will fare better than others, magnetic media generally degrades over time and disks can also fail due to dirt and dust if they're not stored properly. It's vital to archive them to a different media format as soon as possible to retain data. The trouble is that archival can be a cumbersome, long-winded process; unless you have an innovative device to hand. Maker and developer Graham Hooley has created such a tool – a machine that allows a bunch of 3.5-inch floppies to be stacked and automatically read…