Innehållsförteckning för #110 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

After hearing about the science prizewinning LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, magpi.cc/ligo) six PhD students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh decided to see whether they could emulate the idea. LIGO detects the gravitational waves in space caused by celestial objects colliding and predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity. Understanding space has always interested Husni Almoubayyed, so he was attracted to the idea of something that can monitor gravitational effects “stretching and contracting space around us on a very tiny scale”. While there was no expectation of building their own LIGO device, not least because of the expense involved, Husni and fellow students wanted to help communicate to a wide audience how LIGO works. miniLIGO is designed to be a “simplistic and affordable” prototype mimicking the…

For centuries, astronomers have used orreries to simulate the motion of the planets around the sun. These mechanical models of the Solar System originated around 150 BCE, but they gained their name when English nobleman Charles Boyle, the Fourth Earl of Orrery, commissioned his own planetarium in 1713 based on a design by clock makers George Graham and Thomas Tompion. Dmytro Panin would love to have one. “They’re a bit on the bulky side, but I may attempt to build an orrery one day,” he says. In the meantime, he has produced a digital version that is equally captivating and useful, powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. “Astronomy has always fascinated me, and I wanted something that I could look at and see the planets in the Solar System…

HeaterMeter Barbecue If you want to be a true ‘pitmaster’, you’ll want to know all about this open-source controller for your barbecue. Thermistor, or thermocouple probes, are used to monitor the grill, food, and ambient temperatures and adjust the blower to maintain the perfect cooking heat. Raspberry Pi adds a web interface and alarm notifications, so you can sit back and relax. You can buy a ready-made HeaterMeter board, or build your own using the comprehensive online guide. Maker: Bryan Mayland url: magpi.cc/heatermeter BrewPi The key to successful beer brewing is to carefully control the fermentation temperature. The documentation on the BrewPi site shows how to hack a standard fridge to convert it into a smart fermentation chamber by adding a heater and sensors. A ready-made BrewPi Spark unit monitors…

If you cast your mind back many years, you’ll remember the craze of Twitch Plays Pokémon. Using inputs from the user chat, a computer would play through the video game Pokémon Red, often with chaotic results. The popularity of these streams has resulted in many similar ideas, whether directly or indirectly, and Surrogate.TV is one of these. Not only does it allow viewers to control what they see, what they see can be a full-on Raspberry Pi contraption like a painting robot or little fighting robots in real life, with negligible latency. The features are much more rich than in the past as well, so let’s explore how to set up your own fun interactive projects on Surrogate.TV. 01 Assemble your surrogate A camera is essential for this project; however,…

Android on Raspberry Pi has been a topic of discussion for years in specific spaces, and while there have been attempts in the past to port Android, emteria.OS has been the best way to use Android on Raspberry Pi for a few years now. With some recent great updates, we’re revisiting this great OS to get it working as an Android tablet, and see how it can be used for Android dev. 01 Raspberry Pi hardware You’ll need a Raspberry Pi 4 for this project so that you can make the most out of your custom tablet, although you can use a Raspberry Pi 3B+, Raspberry Pi 400, and Compute Module 3 with emteria. Emteria also supports HDMI on Raspberry Pi so you can connect it to a monitor, TV,…

The Santa Detector is a classic project from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, making use of a PIR motion sensor hooked up to some Scratch code so you can find out when Big Red has arrived. Instead of Santa, though, what if it just detected any passer-by to give them a fright? Upgrading this project for our uses is fairly simple. Instead of flashing a picture of Santa, we can replace it with a scary picture. We can also add a scream sound effect to Scratch to go with the picture. Lastly, we’ll have to camouflage it so it can reach the maximum number of people for a scare. magpi.cc/santadetector WE ALL SCREAM From our repository of spooky upgrades, you will find a file called Wilhelm_scream. mp3. In the Sounds tab,…

▸ Pimoroni ▸ magpi.cc/keybow ▸ £50 / $57 Ever since the release of Raspberry Pi Pico, we’ve been interested in its ability to power keyboards, both standard and custom. We’ve seen a couple of DIY projects doing just this, and Pimoroni even released an add-on with a soft keys (RGB Keypad: magpi.cc/rgbkeypad) for Pico at its launch. It was only a matter of time before the RP2040 – the chip that powers Pico – would be used on its own dedicated keypad with real keys. This inevitable product ended up being another Pimoroni product: Keybow 2040. It comes with one of three sets of key switch types depending on your preference: mechanical (clicky-clacky), linear (silent), and tactile (silent with some resistance). All versions have an LED in the switch which…

Raspberry Pi is an incredible piece of hardware for audio, and we know many people that use it for amazing sound systems. Did you know you can also create music on it? Not just with code either, as these projects show! Hex Keys Isomorphic keyboard One of the great instruments designed by Mike Cook, this laser-cut keyboard is quite different to a traditional piano keyboard, but can still make amazing tunes. magpi.cc/pibakery Soundfighter A new challenger What do you do once you’ve mapped piano keys to a PS2 controller? You build a second, identical piano and duke it out in Street Fighter. Go home and be a piano man. magpi.cc/soundfighter Piano stairs Up the scale You don’t just have to make music with your hands – with a little inspiration…

ARGON EON The folks at Argon make great cases, and this four-bay NAS box for Raspberry Pi 4, that they’re crowdfunding, looks like an amazing piece of kit. This case will be made from aluminium with a triangular design, and will also be used for cooling. It even has a cute little OLED display. ▸ kck.st/3BR153B HOME AUTOMATION HAT “Home Automation HAT is a home monitoring and automation controller HAT for the Raspberry Pi that can control up to two appliances/devices on a load of 250 VAC/7 A, 30 VDC/10 A, photo-coupling isolation Optocoupler EL357NC, allowing users to safely control high voltages or current devices.” ▸ kck.st/3ksMnbY…

Raspberry Pi has launched the next generation of its documentation that can be viewed today (magpi.cc/documentation). Writing on the Raspberry Pi blog (magpi.cc/bringondocs), Alasdair Allan, Head of Documentation at Raspberry Pi, says: “The documentation repository itself had been left to grow organically. When I arrived, it needed to be restructured, and a great deal of non-Raspberry Pi specific documentation needed to be removed, while other areas were underserved and needed to be expanded.” Replacing Markdown The new documentation design “comes from the same team of folks that built the excellent PDF-based documentation for Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040.” The PDF documentation for RP2040 and Raspberry Pi Pico was built off an Asciidoc-based toolchain, and “we knew from the outset that we’d want to migrate the current Markdown-based documentation to Asciidoc.…

“It’s great at detecting whether there is or is not a package, but it also sometimes recognises my cats as packages!” Many of us are increasingly ordering goods online, with the consequence that more and more parcels and boxes are landing on doorsteps everywhere. From a security aspect, it can be a little worrying when our precious new purchases are left in plain sight waiting for us to return home. A fun and light-hearted project by Canadian maker Ryder shows one unique way of handling it. Flour power Following the theft of a package from his porch earlier in the year, Ryder decided to take action. “It had never happened to me before and I was a little frustrated,” he recalls. “I’d been doing some image classification work at the…

Released by Konami in 1985, Gradius – also known as Nemesis outside Japan – brought a new breed of power-up system to arcades. One of the keys to its success was the way the player could customise their Vic Viper fighter craft by gathering capsules, which could then be ‘spent’ on weapons, speedups, and shields from a bar at the bottom of the screen. A seminal side-scrolling shooter, Gradius was particularly striking thanks to the variety of its levels: a wide range of hazards were thrown at the player, including waves of aliens, natural phenomena, and boss ships with engine cores that had to be destroyed in order to progress. One of the first stage’s biggest obstacles was a pair of volcanoes that spewed deadly rocks into the air: the…

A familiar sight at official Raspberry Pi events, the All-Seeing Pi is a fun photo booth that lets you add stickers to photos of yourself and tweet them out into the world. It’s a fun thing to replicate at parties and other kinds of events, including perhaps an upcoming Halloween party of your own. To make this appropriately alarming, a first step will be to change the overlays from fun sunglasses and wigs to fangs and witches’ hats. We can add an extra, basic overlay filter with a little trick as well. magpi.cc/allseeingpi DOWNLOAD NEW IMAGES AND CODE FROM MAGPI.CC/SPOOKYUPGRADES AWFUL ACCESSORIES It’s quite simple to switch out the overlays for spooky props – simply add any images you have (or ones from our repository) to the overlays folder of…

▸ The Pi Hut ▸ magpi.cc/poeusbzero ▸ £22 / $25 The PoE USB HAT for Raspberry Pi Zero not only adds an Ethernet port, but enables you to power everything via the same standard RJ45 cable. A nice bonus is the inclusion of three full-size USB Type A ports to connect peripherals. This double-decker HAT features the Ethernet port and fully isolated SMPS (Switch Mode Power Supply) on the bottom board, with a second board stacked on top holding the three USB ports. Coming already assembled, the two boards are held together by hex pillars. Extra pillars and screws are supplied to mount your Raspberry Pi Zero on the top – maybe this should be called a HAB (Hardware Attached on Bottom) rather than a HAT! Free header The USB…

An Introduction to Computer Networking for Teachers Computer networking gives us access to the internet and allows us to communicate with people all over the world, but how many of us know how it really works? Aimed at computer science GCSE teachers, this foundation course is a useful starting point for anyone curious about computer networks. It takes around six hours to complete, over three weeks, although you can work at your own pace. Signing up for a free account gives you five weeks’ access to the course, but there’s the option to upgrade for continued access and to receive a certificate of achievement. The self-guided course teaches you the fundamentals of networking. Week one, ‘Creating Connections’, covers the basics of computer network connections; week two, ‘Packets & Protocols’, explores…

We reviewed the Air Quality Kit for Raspberry Pi last issue, and said it was a “great kit for experimenting with monitoring air quality. Very easy to set up and start using, and with some good coding examples and excellent tutorials.” We have ten up for grabs! Head here to enter: magpi.cc/win Learn more: magpi.cc/airqualitykit Terms & Conditions Competition opens on 29 September 2021 and closes on 28 October 2021. Prize is offered to participants worldwide aged 13 or over, except employees of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Raspberry Pi Trading, the prize supplier, their families, or friends. Winners will be notified by email no more than 30 days after the competition closes. By entering the competition, the winner consents to any publicity generated from the competition, in print and…

Mission Space Lab and Mission Zero are back once again: the challenge where teams of students send code to the ISS (International Space Station) to be run on a couple of Raspberry Pi systems that are installed on the station. These Astro Pi were launched in 2015, though, and are long due an upgrade. Not only will the new Astro Pi computers use a Raspberry Pi 4, they’ll also receive a powered-up Sense HAT and more sensors and features for students to use. This includes a High Quality Camera, Coral machine learning accelerator, colour and luminosity sensor, and a passive infrared sensor. This joins the current sensors of a gyroscope; an accelerometer; a magnetometer; and humidity, temperature, and pressure sensors. “The new hardware makes it possible for teams to design…

Known for his robotic creations, popular YouTuber James Bruton is also a keen Iron Man cosplayer, and his latest invention would surely impress Tony Stark: an intelligent prosthetic arm that can move naturally and autonomously, depending on the wearer’s body posture and limb movements. “It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I’ve never actually attempted properly,” James tells us. “I thought it would be good to have a work stream of something that could be useful.” Motion capture suit To obtain the body movement data on which to base the arm’s movements, James considered using a brain computer, but this would be unreliable without embedding electrodes in his head! So, he instead opted to train it with machine learning. For this he created a motion capture…

Since February this year, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been trundling across the surface of the Red Planet as part of the space agency’s Mars 2020 mission. Its cameras have taken many amazing photographs of a barren landscape and eerie sky, attracting millions of viewers and inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers. Tomasz Burzy is among those enthralled by NASA’s endeavour. “I became interested in robotics a while ago and love seeing the work of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Boston Dynamics,” he says. “The Mars rovers quickly became my favourite pieces of engineering and when I saw Perseverance, I wanted to build a replica.” “I only learned Python at the start of 2020” Unfortunately, Tomasz had no experience of making a remote-control vehicle, so his partner suggested he…

“It uses computer vision and machine learning to help track your HIIT workout progress” Shareable Smartbike Keanu wanted to track his cycling routes using GPS and log his speed and ride length data. Rather than buying a standard bike computer, he decided to create his own which would also turn the lights on and off automatically, as he kept forgetting. It features a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and lots of wiring. Since he wanted to be able to share the bike without interfering with his own ride data, he also added an RFID scanner to identify the rider. Maker: Keanu Dav url: magpi.cc/smartbike RIoT Brick Run Tracker Wanting to log his progress in the Brecon Beacons 10 Peaks ultramarathon, Alan created his own GPS run tracker in a 3D-printed case. As…

Sound and vision is where we’re at for our ultimate server project this month. Sure, serving files is all very well (see The MagPi magazine issue #109, magpi.cc/109) but what about a decent media interface? Luckily we’re spoilt for choice. We’re going to add two media serving solutions, Plex and Mopidy, to our server. Plex is a great choice for playing back your media anywhere in the world and Mopidy can turn your server into a jukebox as well as a multi-room audio streaming system. We’ll also look at how to create your file structure and how to add content from different sources. Let’s hit the play button. 01 Check, check, and check again Before we plunge into the world of media streaming, let’s make sure your ultimate server is…

The amazing temperature-controlled stair lights by Lorraine Underwood (@LmcUnderwood) are a great way to set up decorative lights anywhere – they don’t just need to be on stairs. They also don’t have to be a rainbow. We have a couple of options here to make it a little more Halloween-themed, and that’s mainly down to the colour palettes of the lights. Think oranges, greens, and purples, classic colours for this spooky time of the year. magpi.cc/tempstairs EERIE RGB NeoPixel lights use an RGB colour scale, assigning the red, green, and blue elements an intensity value from 0 to 255. For example, a ghastly green would be (0, 255, 0). For purple and orange, we need a specific mix: purple is (128, 0, 128) and orange is (255, 140, 0). You…

LINUX NETWORKING AND ADMINISTRATION (LFS211) Aimed at IT professionals, this self-paced course from the Linux Foundation is pricey ($299) but offers 50 hours of course material including videos and assignments. ▸ magpi.cc/lfs211 NETWORKING WITH PYTHON Another free course from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it covers the use of sockets in network programming, including methods for testing applications. ▸ magpi.cc/flpythonnetwork A TO Z LINUX NETWORKING CONCEPTS This Udemy course (£59.99) aims to improve your Linux network administration skills by learning to build, maintain, and secure a computer network. ▸ magpi.cc/azlinuxnetwork…

If you’ve been paying attention to the work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, you’ll have seen all the studies into how different backgrounds effect the way people learn and interact with computing. With this new initiative, this research will be able to be applied to new learning. “With computers and digital technologies increasingly shaping all of our lives, it’s more important than ever that every young person, whatever their background or circumstances, has meaningful opportunities to learn about how computers work and how to create with them.” Philip Colligan, CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, wrote in a blog (magpi.cc/rpcercblog). “That’s our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.” New research “The new Research Centre is a joint initiative between the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation,” Philip continues.…