Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #157

Editor This month Lucy grinned in front of a facial recognition project. But drew the line at showing her paws to the Rock, Paper, Scissors build. rpimag.co One amazing thing about Raspberry Pi products is how close you get to the metal. Metal – in this context – isn't music, materials, or military hardware, but the raw, physical hardware that makes a computer tick. Below your programs, underneath any operating system, below the firmware, sits the metal: this is where the magic happens. Raspberry Pi Pico lets you reach into that world. It's a mighty microcontroller board packed with GPIO (general-purpose input/ output) pins. These enable you to hook up electronic components and start experimenting with digital making. Suddenly you're not just coding – you're making! Attach some buttons, lights,…

Raspberry Pi has introduced new variants of its RP2350 microcontroller chip under the A4 stepping (rpimag.co/rp2350). These replace the launch model, which was designated A2, and feature fixes for issues found during Raspberry Pi's Hacking Challenge. Alongside RP2350, Raspberry Pi is launching two RP2354 models. These are pin-compatible variants of the 60-pin RP2350A (with 30 GPIO pins) and 80-pin RP2350B (with 48 GPIO pins) and add 16Mbit/2MB of flash memory in-package. RP2354 contains a Winbond flash die in-package, providing an elegant solution for developers who require a modest amount of storage. Each RP2354 part costs just 20 cents more than the equivalent RP2350 part. RP2350 has found its way into countless third-party products Fixes from the Hacking Challenge The new variants also address issues found during Raspberry Pi's Hacking Challenge…

Raspberry Pi has announced an upgrade to Raspberry Pi Connect – its software designed to enable you to remotely access a Raspberry Pi with screen sharing and remote shell via a web browser. Connect for Organisations features an improved audit log designed to improve operational oversight. Administrators can review activity from the past 90 days. “With the most recent events first, you can see every screen sharing and remote shell session, the creation of access tokens, the addition and removal of devices, and any changes to users and their roles,” says Paul Mucur, senior principal software engineer at Raspberry Pi. What's new? New features also include: Country tracking: see where events took place and spot suspicious activity Download CSV: download detailed logs for auditing and security reviews Filtering: focus on…

Raspberry Pi has made the firmware for its superb Build HAT (rpimag.co/buildhat) add-on board fully open source. Build HAT is Lego Education-compatible hardware that enables Raspberry Pi to control Technic motors and sensors (like those found in the Lego Education SPIKE Prime sets). “We're delighted to announce that the Build HAT firmware, together with its signing keys, is now open source and available under the permissive BSD 3-Clause licence,” says Gordon Hollingworth, CTO (Software) at Raspberry Pi. According to Hollingworth, the decision to release the firmware source reflects a broader commitment to enabling users to “understand and take control of the technology they use where we can.” “When we launched the Build HAT, the firmware that runs on its on-board microcontroller was released in binary form only,” Hollingworth wrote in…

Maker An embedded systems and Linux creator who has had a lifelong fascination with intelligent machines. rpimag.co/edgeberry A lot of Raspberry Pi projects come to us after someone decided they couldn't get the right parts for their own personal project as… well, they didn't exist. Sanne Santens’ impetus for her project was not much different. “Edgeberry is the result of many years of throwing Raspberry Pi [computers] all over the place, literally, with all kinds of sensors, actuators, etc. glued to them, with custom-designed enclosures for protection or integration in its environment,” Sanne says. “I found myself basically redoing substantial parts of the system over and over – but just with small [variations]: making robust power solutions, mounting Raspberry Pi [boards] in boxes, wiring up interface boards, debugging flaky connections,…

Makers Supersense founders James and Matt used their engineering skills to develop a means of helping ageing family members to live safely at home. supersense.com Many readers will recognise the dilemma: an ageing parent or family member who is determined to stay in their own home, maintain their independence, and not be a burden to others. Cost, convenience and quality of life for them and those providing care is a difficult balance all round. Cambridge startup Supersense's Matt Ash and James Brown have direct experience of this precise scenario and used this knowledge to create a Raspberry Pi-controlled hub to support families in which someone lives with dementia. SenS2 uses radar to check unobtrusively for routine activity. It features several different sensors and uses machine learning to plot the person's…