Innehållsförteckning för #121 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

E lectricity is fantastic stuff! It's used to power labour-saving gizmos, light up our streets, move our cars, and perform everyday miracles that would seem the stuff of magic to our ancestors. Understanding electronics is half of the code and digitalmaking ethos that underpins Raspberry Pi. And few devices are better for learning electronics than Pico W. Designed to sit right at the heart of electronic projects, Pico is a low-power microcontroller development board with 40 connections on the side – you can connect Pico to just about anything. Learning electronics is a rite of passage for new Raspberry Pi aficionados. Start by lighting up lights, then create code that responds to buttons, wire up sensors, pull in information from the internet, and build wild creations (page 30). Getting an…

MAKER Brian Corteil Brian is a maker and amateur robot designer with a “toy age” of eight. He's a member of Cambridge Makespace. @CannonFodder Warning! Moving parts Be careful with objects that spin at high speeds and do not touch them Zoetropes were invented by a mathematician called William Horner in 1834 and they proved to be an effective way to produce animations. A set of still images would line the inside of a rotating drum, and viewers would peer through narrow slits in the side. The speed at which they passed the eyes would produce an illusion of movement. As the years went by, the technique was refined and zoetropes remain as much fun today as they did nearly 190 years ago. As if to prove the concept still…

MAKER Martin Spendiff & Vanessa Bradley Martin is a mathematical modeller who left the UK for Switzerland, and a fan of FOSS and tech that serves users, rather than the people who made it. Vanessa is new to coding and a constant source of weird and good ideas. veeb.ch We just can't get enough of Martin Spendiff and Vanessa Bradley's makes – last month the Pico Railway Clock and, this time, we present the Boost-Box. The productive pair have upcycled an old 1970s Hanimex analogue film viewer and turned it into a YouTube viewing terminal – but they only use it to watch uplifting cheerfulness! Martin came across the film viewer in a second hand store and began to feel nostalgic. “When I first went to uni a million years…

MAKER Alasdair Allan Alasdair Allan is Head of Documentation at Raspberry Pi. raspberrypi.com In The MagPi issue #119, we introduced Raspberry Pi Pico W. Based around Raspberry Pi's own RP2040 microcontroller, Pico W brings 802.11n wireless networking to the family of Pico boards. This means that your Raspberry Pi Pico W can now talk to the network, but also that the network can talk back to it; and you can run a web server on your Pico W to allow you to control things remotely. You'll need to attach GPIO headers to Raspberry Pi Pico W and use a breadboard with an LED light for this tutorial. Set everything up as shown in Figure 1. 01 Installing MicroPython The fastest way to get MicroPython is to download the pre-built release binary…

MAKER Sean McManus Author of Mission Python, Scratch Programming in Easy Steps, and Raspberry Pi For Dummies (with Mike Cook). Get free chapters at Sean's website. sean.co.uk We love radio, but don't you ever wish you had more control over the playlist? With Raspberry Radio, every song is your request. You give it a collection MP3 files, and the virtual DJ plays them at random, telling you something about each track. After a few songs, it's time for the news and weather. In this tutorial, you'll see how to download the news headlines using an RSS feed and access your local weather through an API. Next issue, we'll get the DJ talking and cue the music. You can download the code at magpi.cc/newsreader. 01 Install Python modules We'll be using two…

MAKER PJ Evans PJ is a writer, software engineer and tinkerer. His robots bring all the geeks to the yard. twitter.com/mrpjevans If you followed last month's tutorial, you should now have a working robot that you can control with Python. Hopefully, you've played with the code and had the little ‘bot’ zooming around the place. Now it's time to add some sensors, so our new pal can start to sense the world around it. With the ultrasonic and light sensors included with the Camjam EduKit #3, we can add some autonomous capabilities and make our robot a little smarter. Finally, we can look at what you can do to improve the robot even more with custom chassis and additional sensors. 01 Get sensitive Included with your Camjam kit is a light…

Witches fingers This finger food is quite literally fingers… or at least breadsticks with a garlicky tang to them. magpi.cc/witchfingers Dirt and worms Gummy worms buried in crumbled biscuits and chocolate pudding? Spooky and delicious. magpi.cc/dirtnworms Sausage mummies Cocktail sausages wrapped in spirals of puff pastry – add edible eyes or little dots of mustard to make them really stand out. magpi.cc/sausagemummies…

INTERVIEW > Name Sam Alder | > Occupation Illustrator and animator > Community role Illustrator | > URL  samalder.co.uk You may have noticed that we sometimes have excellent illustrated covers – such as issue 120's robot cover, or even cool graphics throughout a feature. If you've ever thought they look similar to some official Raspberry Pi art, you'd be right, as they're also by the excellent Sam Alder, illustrator and animator for Raspberry Pi. “Or as I like to describe it: I draw things and sometimes make them move – whether they like it or not,” clarifies Sam. What is your history with drawing? Growing up, I was always a massive doodler, first copying my favourite cartoons like Ren and Stimpy, Earthworm Jim, and Rocko's Modern Life, and later drawing my…

THE FINAL WORD For a very long time, I've been into dressing up. I vividly remember being 17 and going to every charity shop in town looking for a specific type of striped trouser I could wear for an Ace Ventura outfit. It wasn't even for a specific or important event. It was just fun. Fast forward several years, and suddenly I'm attending comic cons and anime conventions, and seeing a lot of people having fun dress up as their favourite fictional characters, so I join in. The more I participated and learned about cosplay, the more I noticed the creativity and craft behind it – and the impressive electronics people were installing. As the internet, YouTube tutorials, and making in general, has blown up over the last decade, so…

MAKER Maximilian Kern A hardware developer based in Germany, who likes to do DIY projects in his spare time, including hardware, software and mechanical design. magpi.cc/zerobug In issue 119 (magpi.cc/119), we reviewed the intimidating SpiderPi, a big hexapod robot that tormented our editor's poor cat. Shortly after the release of the issue, Maximilian Kern emailed us about the one he'd created himself, called ZeroBug, appropriately powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero. “Zero is in charge of the input methods,” Maximilian explains. “It runs a custom web interface and an instance of Pygame. This makes it possible to control the robot using a mouse, keyboard, multitouch, or simply an Xbox gamepad… Instead of specialised robotics servos, this robot uses inexpensive micro servos. Inside its 3D-printed frame there is just enough room…

MAKER Dr James Scott, Jeremy Taylor, Jim Rowe Dr James Scott, a geologist at the University of Otago, and Jeremy Taylor set up the Fireballs Aotoreoa meteor tracking programme with input from Jim Rowe of the UK Fireball Alliance. fireballs.nz The excitingly named Fireballs Aotearoa (fireballs.nz) is an ambitious research project that aims to make good on the Global Meteor Network's aim of ensuring no meteor is undetected. The GMN's worldwide meteor and meteorite tracking endeavours already had sites spread across Europe and the US, but few in the Southern Hemisphere. With international news coverage of a fireball over southern England in March 2021 that was successfully tracked by citizen scientists, there has been a significant increase in the number of meteor cameras in the UK and beyond. A Fireballs…

MAKER Tom Verbeure Tom is a hardware engineer for Nvidia, who Loves playing and occasionally blogs about all kinds of electronics projects. magpi.cc/tomverbeure T here are many practical applications for a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board, but it's important to have a heap of fun too! With his latest project, Tom Verbeure has literally had a ball, creating a NeoPixel-covered sphere that dazzles in more ways than one. After all, as Tom says: “LED cubes have been pretty popular, but spheres are a much harder problem, mechanically.” The idea for the project followed a friendly chat. “I was having a lunchtime discussion at work with my friend, Jens, a 3D printing wizard, about doing things with LEDs that hasn't really been done before,” Tom recalls. After ordering a 3D printer…

MAKER PJ Evans PJ is a writer, software engineer and general tinkerer. He can currently be found replacing all his old microcontroller projects with Raspberry Pi Pico Ws. @MrPJEvans If the new Raspberry Pi Pico W's wireless LAN capability has got you eager to start making but you're not sure where to start, you're in the right place. We're going to take a step-by-step look at simple components for inputs and outputs, connect them to Pico W, and then fetch data from the internet and display them. We're going to do this without any of the difficulty of soldering, or even handling components, by using the SB Components Pico Breadboard kit. This PCB (printed circuit board) comes pre-populated with buttons and LEDs to make your introduction to electronics as simple…

Halloween parties are great. When else do you have an excuse to eat unusual amounts of sweets while watching a marathon of The Simpsons episodes, and maybe partaking of a beverage that is a) smoking and b) served out of a cauldron? This year, let's make this a Halloween party to remember by performing some mad science with a Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi Pico to make everything a little more… eerie. You won't need strikes of lightning for this, just some long USB leads and/or batteries. Let's get spooky. ATROCIOUS ALTERNATE ARTICLES Spook up your Raspberry Pi magpi.cc/110 Make your existing Raspberry Pi projects seasonally spooky with this frightening feature. Haunted House Hack magpi.cc/98 A gruesome guide for making your home horrifying this Halloween. 10 Spooktastic Halloween Costume Projects…

Eyeball snot-tail This mix of lime jelly, apple and/or pear juice, lemonade, lychees, cherries, and raisins creates a light, tasty citrusy mocktail that also happens to look like it's eyes in nondescript green goop. magpi.cc/snottail Halloween punch This spiced and spicy cherry juice punch has a bit of a bite, and not just from the tangy, fangy sweets. magpi.cc/punch Mulled apple juice If you want to serve something a little more traditional and a little less gimmicky, this mulled apple juice is a great idea. magpi.cc/mulledapple…

► Pervasive Displays ► magpi.cc/epdk ► £25 / $30 This neat little kit is a great way to add a small e-ink display to a Raspberry Pi Pico – in fact one is included in the kit. It uses a specific extension board to connect to the screen and then to Pico using provided jumper wires – this does mean that it has a larger footprint than, say, the Badger 2040 from Pimoroni, which is used as a fun name badge. This EPD is aimed at slightly different applications and users though. With full access to the rest of Pico, many more sensors and inputs can be connected to the system, allowing it to be used for temperature and air-con control – shown off quite nicely in the demo video…

Every Monday we ask the question: have you made something with a Raspberry Pi over the weekend? Every Monday, our followers send us amazing photos and videos of the things they've made. Here's a selection of some of the awesome things we got sent this month – and remember to follow along at the hashtag #MagPiMonday!…

MAKER Kevin McAleer Kevin McAleer makes robots, brings them to Life with code, and makes videos about them on YouTube. magpi.cc/kevinmcaleer In the early 2000s, Big Mouth Billy Bass – a kitschy, 3D plastic fish mounted in a picture frame that appears to sing, as well as writhe around – became such an in-demand item that there's reputedly one hanging proudly above the grand piano at the Queen's Balmoral residence. YouTuber, and Raspberry Pi enthusiast, Kevin McAleer relates this apocryphal tale while introducing his latest Raspberry Pi project: a Pico W-controlled update to the tuneful animatronic sea creature, hosted at mouthpi.co. Kevin first fell in love with computing when he became the proud owner of a ZX Spectrum back in 1982. He went on to study computer science. He had…

MAKER Juha “A Finnish middleaged guy,” Juha runs the Brick Experiment Channel on YouTube, dedicated to building and experimenting with LEGO Technic bricks. He has worked for over ten years as a software engineer. magpi.cc/becyoutube Keeping an inverted pendulum aloft is a popular challenge in control theory – which deals with the behaviour of dynamical systems – and requires precise motion control to prevent it from falling over. It's something maker and YouTuber Juha, of the Brick Experiment Channel, learned about in courses he did 20 years ago, which inspired him to try it with LEGO and Raspberry Pi. Made of LEGO bricks, his inverted pendulum requires active control to stay upright. A ‘reaction wheel’, also made from LEGO, is mounted on the pendulum and attached to a motor controlled…

MicroPython and Pico Created by the team at Raspberry Pi Press, this book is packed with official information on how to program Pico with the MicroPython language. magpi.cc/picobook Pico Documentation Raspberry Pi's website has a stack of documentation designed to introduce you to all the details that make up Pico. magpi.cc/picodocs Pico Forum If you are stuck with a problem, or want to see what folks are saying about Pico W, then bookmark Raspberry Pi's dedicated Pico forum page. magpi.cc/picoforum…

MAKER Rob Zwetsloot Rob is The MagPi Features Editor, and he sometimes fancies himself a game developer when he's not playing games. magpi.cc Didya see, didya hear, didya know that virtual pets are still going strong today? Your Tamagotchis, Digimons, and weird alien-themed knock-offs are still around with improved functionality. They're still stuck in their little plastic bodies though, so we thought it was high time we made one from scratch that you can play on your Raspberry Pi desktop. No magical crest required. Make sure you're on the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS on your Raspberry Pi, and update all the software. Alternatively, you can make this on another computer, as long as you install the Pygame library. 01 Get your art We've provided code and art on our…

MAKER Stephen Smith Stephen is a retired software developer who has written three books on ARM Assembly Language Programming. He is a member of Sunshine Coast Search and Rescue and enjoys mountain biking, hiking, and running. He is also a member of the Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society (scwes.ca). magpi.cc/stephensmith Directly controlling hardware devices with the ARM CPU, like we did in the previous tutorial (see The MagPi issue #120, magpi.cc/120), uses a lot of processing power that you might need for higher-level tasks. The Raspberry Pi Pico contains eight PIO processors that you can use to offload I/O related processing. In this tutorial, we will blink the Raspberry Pi Pico's on-board LED. The program downloads a small assembly language program to one of the PIO processors which will…

► Kitronik ► magpi.cc/kitronikpico ► £41 / $49 Kitronik's Autonomous Robotics Platform caught our attention recently thanks to its usage of Raspberry Pi Pico, rather than the more common Raspberry Pi Model B or Zero models. The kit contains a robotics platform chassis with two TT motors pre-mounted. Two large yellow wheels are attached to the side, along with an ultrasonic sensor on the top and a line-following sensor underneath. Finally, a Pico or Pico W with a GPIO header soldered in can be mounted in the middle of the two motors. Four AA batteries are slotted in underneath to provide power to the motors and Pico. The result is a cute-looking robot that is easy to assemble, making it perfect for younger robotics makers. It's incredibly lightweight and moves…

Raspberry Pi Projects While a Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to be used as a desktop PC, what makes it special is its 40-pin GPIO (general-purpose input/output) header. As well as being used for connecting add-on HAT boards, the GPIO makes it possible to hook up all sorts of standard electronic components, usually on a breadboard. The Raspberry Pi Foundation's learning resources website is a great place to get started with building your own circuits and writing programs on Raspberry Pi to control them. It features a wide range of electronics projects, filterable by topic, hardware (including Pico microcontroller), software, and difficulty level. For electronics newbies, we recommend the Physical Computing with Python tutorial. There are also multistage paths introducing physical computing with Scratch (magpi.cc/scratchpath) and digital making with Pico…

More mother clocks [In reply to a tweet about the Pico railway clock from issue 120 – Ed] My old uni had something like this through our building. Someone cut a wire somewhere and killed the whole system until it was traced. I thought it received a 1Hz ‘clock’ pulse (you see what I did there!). The system could send multiple pulses to adjust for summer time hours. Steve via Twitter That sounds like a bad way to find out about that system – we had other people tell us of similar systems, such as factory clocks. Again, it's wild that such seemingly ubiquitous tech has been lost to time, especially as it seemed to work pretty well – despite the hazard of being cut. Embedded events I saw that…