Innehållsförteckning för #126 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

It’s 2023, and we’re off to a great start with a brand-new Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 (page 36). Camera Module is a great way to add vision and image recognition to your projects, and the latest model is packed with new features to discover. A new Raspberry Pi product is also a great sign of things to come. Raspberry Pi’s Eben Upton has given us a supply chain update (page 8), and it’s good news. We’re already seeing lots of stock in stores and you should find it much easier to pick up projects and start that build this year. There are also some great new audio boards (page 10) that can be turned into pro sound systems, and other audiothemed projects. Hidden amongst the bevvy of new products…

MAKER teampinball.com Team Pinball is the UK’s only pinball design-and-build company. Based in Wales - pretty near to the Raspberry Pi factory, by coincidence rather than design - the trio behind Team Pinball come from Hungary and France, and are firm believers in all things open-source. Having seen the success of RetroPie gaming and how well it uses the capabilities of Raspberry Pi, the founders set about designing a new generation of pinball machines. “Raspberry Pi is a powerful tool that has already found its place in the video game community with RetroPie. We wanted to do the same and create new, fun games with the Raspberry Pi,” explains Romain Fontaine. When the team sat down to decide on the theme and title for their pinball machine, it became clear…

MAKER lorraine.mcunderwood.org Wintertime illuminated walks and interactive art shows have proved extremely popular over the past few years. Blackpool’s Odyssey lights combine the two, adding to the appeal of the renowned annual Blackpool Illuminations with impressive largescale installations that respond to and even follow visitors as they explore the brightly lit site. Odyssey is the brainchild of Lightworks, which creates and manages the existing Blackpool Illuminations attraction, Blackpool-born costume designer Jack Irving (jackirving.co.uk), and Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications. The research team there led by Joe Finney, Professor of Computer Science, includes Raspberry Pi enthusiast and The MagPi regular Lorraine Underwood, a Senior Teaching Associate of Creative and Applied Computing. They had worked with Lightworks before to produce interactive displays, “but this is our first proper huge-scale project…

Camera Module 3 is “our latest generation of low-cost lightweight camera modules for general day and night time photography using your Raspberry Pi computer,” explains Simon Martin, Senior Principal Hardware Engineer at Raspberry Pi. The big difference is the new Sony IMX708 camera at the heart. This is “the latest, most up-to-date sensor from Sony Imaging,” Simon tells us. It has a “12-megapixel sensor with builtin HDR for bright colourful photography and it supports autofocus directly from libcamera.” “The more pixels in the camera, the more detail captured in the photograph,” says Simon. “However, to achieve this you need a better quality lens” and the Camera Module 3 has a lens upgrade that “can do justice to a 12-megapixel sensor.” You can snap photos in regular or HDR mode. “Regular…

MAKER raspberrypi.com/tutorials You can create all kinds of fun projects when you pair a Raspberry Pi with a lowcost USB software-defined radio (SDR). An SDR is essentially a radio wave receiver that can pick up signals from a variety of frequencies, such as digital television and AM, FM, and DAB radio broadcasts. This tutorial will focus on the information transmitted by the transponders installed on aircraft flying overhead using Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). These avionic systems provide information to identify aircraft, as well as their barometric altitude, to the air traffic control (ATC) systems on the ground and to the traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS) on other aircraft. Listening in to these signals provides a fascinating insight into a world we all take for granted. Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+…

In many ways, we do live in a sci-fi future. One of those ways is home automation with so much controllable from an Alexa or Google Nest thanks to smart plugs, Wi-Fi-controlled thermostats, and light bulbs. Thanks to Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico, you can further, heavily customise your home automation system, and the perfect place to start is with your lighting setup. From colourful LED displays to simply turning your sitting room lights on, you can do it all with Raspberry Pi. Let there be light.…

One of the most popular hobby uses for Raspberry Pi is for home automation. You can get many add-ons, HATs, and connected devices that talk to it, and the internet is full of tutorials and guides, We’ve even done a few big articles about it ourselves. Here are some tips for controlling your lights. Energenie automated plug sockets A safe way to control lights and lamps, Energenie is a smart plug socket that provides an add” on board for Raspberry Pi that allows it to communicate with the plug socket wirelessly. You can get info on the plugs and add-ons at energenie4u.co.uk, and a simple Python library is all you need to connect to it. Long-time friend of the magazine Stewart Watkiss also has a good guide on how to…

AUTHOR Coursera Price From £8/$l0 per course (annual fee £324/$399) coursera.org Unlike many of the online guides to LibreOffice, Coursera’s go beyond the basic program setup and help you with specific business tasks, such as creating a marketing plan or process flowchart. Generating SQL and database queries within LibreOffice are among the potentially more useful skills you might find helpful. Coursera’s approach to online learning is to provide followalong modules in which you emulate what the trainer does by means of a split screen. This means you can be sure that you have completed the steps required for each task. The subscription model for Coursera will serve you well if you’re keen to gain confidence across multiple disciplines.…

The MagPi | INTERVIEW Name ALex Martinez Community role Mentor Occupation Teacher Twitter @DeMarquesina Pi Wars may famously be an offshoot of Camjam, the Cambridge Raspberry Jam, but it’s not just limited to makers from that pocket of England. There are people who come from near and far to participate and, during the 2021 Pi Wars At Home competition, it even reached the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, and makerspace organiser Alex Martinez. “I am a former geologist that ended up teaching computers in our hometown Uno Academy School,” Alex tells us. “I teach the use of computers to kids from 1st-12th grade in the school. In 2017, I founded with my kids ‘Talleres de Marquesina’ Makerspace, a community makerspace in our home garage where we make many projects and…

The MagPi | THE FINAL WORD If, like me, you are cursed to browse Twitter and other social media a good portion of your day, you may have noticed the hubbub around AI art. New companies have used advanced AI algorithms and thousands upon thousands of images and art pieces posted online to create art generators that output very convincing pictures. The tech itself is extremely impressive. However, there are many moral and ethical questions around the art it’s learning from - especially if the art itself was used without the consent of the artist. Also, the hands and eyes always look weird. Similar things can be said about text generators like ChatGPT. We’ve seen people use it to create a jumping on point for simple Python code, which is…

MAKER raspberryjamberlin.de Star Trek: Lower Decks is a surprisingly faithful The Next Generation-era Star Trek show with a few extra jokes thrown in - and because it’s set in that era, the familiar LCARS computer interface designed by Michael Okuda for Next Gen is seen throughout the show. This interface has been replicated a lot over the years, but this version is a little different. “Ritos is a website LCARS system based off of Star Trek: Lower Decks,” James Mitchell, creator of PiRitos, tells us. “It was created by meWho Rob (@meWho_System47). Basically, it is a pretty screensaver-type site for fans. PiRitos is the extension of the Ritos system, hosted on a Raspberry Pi and has some extra server-based features. For example, connecting to sensors and syncing red alert status…

MAKER @philkingeditor Top Tip Duplicate or delete By right-clicking a single block, or the top of multiple connected blocks, you can opt to duplicate it, add a comment (to explain it), or delete it. Or you can simply drag blocks to the left of the coding area to delete them. You don’t necessarily have to type lines and lines of code to create a computer program. With Scratch, you can build programs by connecting blocks together. Created by the boffins at MIT, no wonder Scratch is a favourite resource for teaching children how to start coding, as it’s easy to learn and can be used to create all sorts of programs, animations, and games. There are lots of built-in graphics and backdrops to choose from, or you can create your…

@ben_everard Ben’s house is slowly being taken over by 3D printers. He plans to solve this by printing an extension, once he gets enough printers. One of the biggest challenges with learning a new skill is having a project to start with. Too complex a project and it can be hard to know where to start, and you can end up going round in circles and giving up before you’ve really started. Too simple, and it can seem like you’re not really getting anything out of it. In this article, we’re going to pick our favourite ‘simple but not too simple’ PCB project - Christmas lights. It’ll be a little PCB that holds one or more LEDs that you can solder up. If you want to, you can add a…

MOTIONSENSING LIGHTS A PIR sensor is a cheap component that’s able to detect motion by sensing the changing infrared radiation given off by people moving in its view. You can use them for floodlights, or to save on energy bills by having lights automatically turn off if no one is present. Find out more at: magpi.cc/smartpir NIGHT LIGHT A light-dependent resistor, or LDR, changes resistance depending on the amount of light. Changes in resistance mean a change in current due to Ohm’s law (Voltage = Current × Resistance), which, with proper calibration, can be used to detect when it’s dark to turn on a light. You’ll need to use a capacitor or extra circuits with a Raspberry Pi to properly detect it, though, as it requires some analogue sensing. Read…

01 Hue bulbs and bridge For this you’ll need Philips Hue lights, Wi-Fi controllable bulbs, and a Hue Bridge to control them from. You’ll need to learn the IP address for the Bridge when it is connected to the network, which can be done with a network sniffer or in your router’s admin details. 02 PiHue code Tim Richardson’s PiHue code works by controlling an entire room of lights, or individual lights, you’ll need to add the IP of the Hue Bridge into the ‘bridgeip’ field in the code. From here, you can also change the list of colours for the light to take, as well as alert patterns and other functionality. 03 Touch control PiHue is set up to work with a Pimoroni Touch pHAT, with different functions respectively. For the base…

Getting Started Guide AUTHOR The Document Foundation Price: Free download magpi.cc/libreofficestart LibreOffice is a free, fullyfeatured office suite that runs like a dream on Raspberry Pi OS. In fact, you’ll find its component programs by clicking the Raspberry Pi icon at the top left of the Raspberry Pi OS desktop, and then hovering your mouse over the Office menu item to reveal Base, Calc, Writer, Impress, Draw, and Math (database, spreadsheet, word processor, presentation, illustration, formula apps, respectively). Documents produced using LibreOffice are compatible with the likes of Microsoft Office and Google’s office apps, so you can write, edit and format text documents presentations, and spreadsheets in LibreOffice and be confident they will open in other office suites. The Document Foundation (the organisation behind LibreOffice) publishes its own Getting Started…

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 have 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 magpi.cc/biomechstan Raspberry Pi always has the potential to put a spring in our step but, in the case of this project, it’s doing so in a literal sense. A research group at Stanford University has designed a robotic exoskeleton - an external frame that aims to support the body - with the aim of helping people with mobility impairments to walk and run more quickly. It’s worn over the lower leg like a boot, and it has the potential to be revolutionary. According to the team, exoskeletons of this nature, while proving effective in reducing the energy required to walk, tend to be expensive. They are also usually tethered which, as you can imagine, would be restrictive. The Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory’s exoskeleton, however, is neither of those things. And…

MAKER nicholashacault.com Portability is one of the great benefits of owning a small, yet powerful, computer such as Raspberry Pi. So long as you have a screen and keyboard to hand, you can pop one into your bag and take it on your travels. Or, as Nicholas Hacault has shown, you can actually make Raspberry Pi a feature of your bag and gain instant access to it wherever you go. Nicholas came up with the idea when he was looking for a way of transporting a Linux device. At first, he considered running a virtual machine on his laptop. “But that sounded like too easy a solution,” he says. “Since I was already bringing a bag to school, I figured that a backpack would be the perfect housing for my…

MAKER magpi.cc/paperpigit Sometimes it seems as though everyday technology and media is getting progressively brighter, louder, and more in-your-face, with every second advertising hoarding being an interactive TikTok experience. PaperPi is intended as a tonic to all that, with its maker billing the combination of Raspberry Pi and e-paper screen device as a “quiet internet radio.” With our eyes, ears, and attention in constant demand from screens and speakers, the idea of a more relaxing reading and listening experience chimes with our craving for peacefulness and time to think. Now in its third iteration, PaperPi is “a lovely, quiet, slow internet e-paper radio [that] rotates through your choice of plug-in screens at the pace you choose,” according to its inventor, Aaron, in his summary YouTube video (magpi.cc/paperpiyt). Early promise As…

MAKER raspberrypi.com/tutorials You’ll Need RaspberryPiZero 3-inchspeaker MiniArcadeButton As an example of what Raspberry Pi audio boards can do, let’s walk through the creation of a toy Chatter Box. Its on board microphone, programmable button, and speaker driver make the Codec Zero an ideal choice for this application. A random pre-recorded five-second audio clip will be played when the button is pressed. After holding it for ten seconds, a notifying burp sound will be emitted, after which a new five-second clip will be recorded. Holding the button down for more than 20 seconds will play a second burp sound, and then erase all previous recordings. 01 Hardware and wiring For this project, any small passive speaker should be sufficient. We’re using a 3-inch one which handles 5W of power at…

MAKER nikrawlinson.com Tides are predictable, but it’s still easy to lose track of the times for high and low water. As a result, you might pull up at high tide to find the beach has disappeared… or at low tide, and found your boat grounded. Put an end to that once and for all with our handy tide tracker, which uses an API to download tidal forecasts for more than 600 monitoring stations around the UK. The results shouldn’t be used for navigation or other water-borne activities, but they may be just what you need to save yourself a wasted journey, or to keep an eye on the tide cycles however far you live from the coast. 01 Attach a header We’re using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for this…

IMPRESS TEMPLATES The presentation tool Impress has had an update to version 7.4 and it now supports themes, making for smarter slides. For a more bespoke look, head to this GitHub page where you’ll find all manner of instantly downloadable templates. magpi.cc/impresstemplates OS COLLEGE OS College specialises in helping people get the most from open-source software. It has a whole section with advice on setting up and using LibreOffice programs and YouTube tutorials. It also includes details of web-based use and setting up LibreOffice with a server for online access. oscollege.com NEURONICA The Extensions library for LibreOffice provides a wealth of extras that tailor the suite to your needs. One such example, Neuronica, exploits neural networks and machine learning to turn Calc into a tool for data crunching and trend…

Supercomputers I remember reading an article about a team who built a Raspberry Pi ‘supercomputer’. Can you remind me which issue that was in please? It was by a British university and was the first time it had been done. Bradley via email This is a tricky one, as there have been a lot of Raspberry Pi supercomputers that we’ve covered over the years, and none we can think of that was specifically British. Hopefully, we can help with some links - the SeeMore sculpture is the first one that comes to mind when talking about supercomputers or cluster computers: magpi.cc/seemore. OctaPi is an older project that uses eight Raspberry Pi for this: magpi.cc/octapi. There’s also a more recent tutorial as well, that you can find here magpi.cc/newcluster. Serial GPIO…