Innehållsförteckning för #128 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

Learning to code can be a life-changing experience. Computers are useful things, and learning how to get under the hood is - in itself - pretty rewarding, and there’s plenty of demand for coders worldwide. But beyond that, learning to program teaches you how to think. You learn how to break down complex tasks and put things in order. It teaches you how to solve seemingly impossible problems. Our Learn to Code with Python feature (page 44) can help you out on this journey. I hope you take it. You’ll also discover excellent Computer Science resources in this issue (page 80), including CS50 and MITx (both of which helped me immeasurably when I got serious about coding). Blending code with hardware is what The MagPi is all about. And you…

MAKER magpi.cc/motorizedcamgit Electronics engineer Vito counts astronomy and photography among his interests. After using Raspberry Pi a few years ago as part of his role in the medical sphere, he realised it would fit rather neatly with his hobbies too. This led to him setting up the YouTube channel Vigasan (magpi.cc/vigasanyt) to showcase his projects. The Heavy Pan Tilt System addresses a common issue with astrophotography: the need for a setup robust enough to take a hefty digital SLR camera and have it pan smoothly across the night sky without juddering or losing either focus or the object in the viewfinder. Commercial options tend to be “quite expensive astronomical mounts,” so Vito set about create his own version using his own mechanical designs and software to automate object tracking. Raspberry…

MAKER there.oughta.be The addictive qualities of the computer game Tetris are well-known, so it’s perhaps no surprise to learn that there is a whole community of Game Boy Tetris fans who meet online for tournaments. The RP2040 microcontroller-based Game Boy Interceptor came about when just such a tournament was being planned, “and, of course, they wanted to stream the contestants’ gameplay,” relates fellow Tetris fan Sebastian Staacks. “Streaming would not be a problem with a modified Game Boy or a modern Game Boy clone such as the Analogue Pocket,” says Sebastian, “but it would mean contestants would be forced to use the same platform in order to compete.” This change just wouldn’t fly: “the contestants always played their favourite Game Boy model and, in a contest, would want to use…

MAKER magpi.cc/fasip Although it has become known by its German moniker of FASIP (shorthand for Panzerfahrsimulator), the vehicle was actually developed in France in the 1970s, explains Gerold Handschin, one of the trio from the tank museum who set about saving the unlikely survivor. “A total of eight tracks were used to train prospective tank drivers, initially for the Centurion tank and later for the Panzer 68 and Leopard 2,” Gerold relates. The trainee driver sat in a replica driver’s cab, with a screen displaying the terrain he needed to negotiate. Hydraulics under the cab replicated the tank’s movements, while a camera on a trolley travelled the length of the i2m-long detailed terrain model. The combination of responsiveness to the driver’s steering movements and on-screen display created a realistic driving…

MAKER magpi.cc/herbiebot “Have you ever lugged around the yard a gallon jug of lawn-safe herbicide with a battery-powered spray wand?" asks Russ Hall. He’s the creator of many lawnkeeping robots, and now is battling against pesky weeds. “After a while, the hands, arms, and eyes tire of the repetition; it’s work!” Russ continues. “I remembered my yardbot/mowbot, and thought I could rig up a sprayer with a camera and AI.” Russ had previously built a mapping robot for inside his house using Raspberry Pi, and decided to use that instead of the ZED camera and Nvidia-powered computer. “Raspberry Pi was easier to work with, as well as being less expensive,” he says. Yard work “Working with hardware is a fun challenge to me and this robot was no different,” Russ…

The Magpi | FEATURE In this crash course, we’ll take you through the key principles of Python programming on Raspberry Pi. For this guide, we’ll be doing all our coding in the Thonny IDE (integrated development environment) in Raspberry Pi OS. An IDE is a program that is used to create other programs. You can create programs in any text editor, but using an IDE makes life easier (especially for newcomers). From the desktop applications menu, select Programming > Thonny. The Thonny IDE starts up in simple mode by default. Along the top are large icons including Load, Save, Run, and Stop. The main panel is where you will write your lines of Python code. At the bottom is the Shell panel whete you’ll see output and any error messages…

OpenAI’s Whisper neural net was trained on 680,000 hours of speech data scraped from the web, covering multiple languages. This gives it remarkable accuracy, Although it’s not free of worrying ethical implications about both whether that speech data should have been used like this and how Whisper itself could be used, the nature of speech recognition means that at least we won’t be dealing with the problems of creative plagiarism that affect generative Als designed to ‘create’ text and images. Spend enough time playing with it, particularly if it doesn’t clearly catch someone’s words, and you’ll see Whisper inferring content that has nothing to do with what you actually said, but does have a kind of internal, albeit fictitious logic. It’s this kind of behaviour that leads people prone to…

Looking up at the night sky is something we’ve been doing since ancient times, with stars, planets, and moons shining down from the cosmos to remind us that there’s a whole universe beyond Earth. Taking photos of the night sky to capture these sights can be a little tricky, though. This is where Raspberry Pi comes in. With a range of excellent Camera Modules and customisable automation, you can pretty easily create a setup that will catch the wonders of the night and the beauty of far-off celestial bodies. It’s time to heed the call of the night.…

01 Setting up the software For doing what is called a photo stack, we are going to be using the GNU Image Manipulation Program (IMP) from gimp.org. Once you’ve installed that, you’ll also need a plug-in to create the stack. Grab this from magpi.cc/starstack and follow the instructions 02 Get your photos Grab the USB drive with your photos and put it into your PC. We suggest copying them to a new folder on your PC to work with - make sure you know where it lives! Once that’s done, open IMP, go to File > Create > Startrail. Set ‘Light Frames’ to the folder you put all the photos you want to use in, and click OK. “ You might be able to tailor the perfect shot ” 03 More options There…

► Elecrow ► magpi.cc/meteor10 ► £91 / $110 SPECS DISPLAY: 10.1 Ips, 1200×800 pixels, 5-point multi-touch control PORTS & CABLES: HDMI port, 2 × micro-USB ports, HDMI cable, microHDMI adapter, 2 × micro-USB to USB cables OTHER: Raspberry Pi mounting point with screws, 2 × ptastic stand tegs Verdict The RGB marquee lighting is a bit gimmicky, but the picture quality is good and touch control works well. As a bonus, the screen can also be used with many other devices. 8/10 With a trail of glowing RGB LEDs around the edge and rear, the Meteor 10.1” Touch Screen offers animated ambient lighting with 19 selectable effects. It can prove a little distracting, though, so luckily there’s a button to turn it off. Another button enables adjustment of the backlight…

Raspberry Jams I read about CamJam coming back and was wondering if the calendar with all the Jams would be too? It helped introduce me to a few events in my area a few years back, and was hoping I might find some more if it came back. Mel via Twitter This issue sees the triumphant return of our community events pages - you can check them out over the page - and they’re backed up by the new events site that you can find at magpi.cc/events. Hopefully, the info will help you find more local events and friends! Future article request I wonder if, in the future, you could print articles on the following: gpio readall - the installation of and usage of as a means of checking the…

MAKER veeb.ch We have all, let’s be honest, clockwatched at some point in our working lives. Well, friends of The Mag Pi, Martin Spendiff and Vanessa Bradley have come up with a little idea that might improve your working day, bringing a colourful rainbow display at close of business, where once there was the face of a benign and mundane clock. This physical Progress Bar (magpi.cc/progressbar) could be just the ticket to brighten up your office and gladden your soul. Inspiration, Martin tells us, came from “a fondness for clocks and way too much time looking at progress bars. As a random bit of pub trivia… the progress bar was first used long before computers were invented - back in the 1800s.” So, Veeb’s fresh take on the concept began…

MAKER magpi.cc/csabanagy Whenever a new Camera Module, or updated software for existing camera hardware comes out, we dream of all the cool things we could do with it. While custom cinematography and automated processes are high on our list, making a cinematic-quality camera is where Csaba Nagy went with CinePI. “CinePI is an open-source project that can transform a Raspberry Pi into a high-end cinema camera,” Csaba tells us. “Its standout feature is the ability to record 2K RAW Cinema DNG video at frame rates up to 50 fps with 12-bit colour depth. This makes CinePI an ideal camera for capturing cinematic-quality footage in various projects, such as short films, commercial work, and YouTube videos.” 2K is basically 1080p. However, at a 12-bit colour depth, that is astonishing - most…

MAKER Lpenguintutor.com twitter.com/stewartwatkiss You’ll Need Breadboard PIRmotionsensor WhiteLEDs 150 resistors Jumperwires In this project, you will learn how to detect when someone enters a room using a PIR (passive infrared) motion sensor. You will learn how to use MicroPython to carry out actions based on the PIR sensor. The code can make decisions and set an output. This can be used to turn on LEDs. You’ll also learn about schematic circuit diagrams, making it easier to understand how a circuit works. 01 What is a microcontroller? A microcontroller is an electronic device. It is a type of computer, in that it runs code to determine what actions to take, but it isn’t as powerful as your Raspberry Pi computer and does not run an operating system. The…

You can still get great shots without a telescope, using just a Raspberry Pi HQ Camera, if you choose the right lenses and program the shot in a specific way. 01 Choosing a lens Without a telescope, you’ll probably be aiming for night sky photos that include a lot of the sky and don’t focus on celestial bodies. In this case, 16-24mm wide-angle lenses are a good option, which means the 16 mm lens often sold with High Quality Cameras is a perfect place to start. 02 Exposure settings A longer exposure setting allows for more light to be captured by the sensor. For astrophotography, you normally want 15 to 30 seconds of exposure so enough light data can be captured. The libcamera library is programmed in microseconds, so this would be…

CODE: THE HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF COMPUTER HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE Author Charles PetzoLd Looks at how computers and code impact our everyday Lives and our interactions, from the way we describe things to our modes of communication. magpi.cc/codebook THE SECOND MACHINE AGE: WORK, PROGRESS, AND PROSPERITY IN A TIME OF BRILLIANT TECHNOLOGIES Unavoidable and sometimes awkward consequences as machines, robots, and artificial intelligence impact the way we work, influence society, and reward some at the expense of others. magpi.cc/2mabook THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE Tracy Kidder’s seminal guide to the history of computer science is essential reading, introducing us to the industry’s btow-hard business overachievers, grafters, and wingers with humorous insight. magpi.cc/soanm…

STACK OVERFLOW If your code is broken, or you just can’t think of a way to tackle something, appeal to fettow coders and get some expert advice. stackoverflow.com JAVA T POINT Great for help with a specific computing topic, or a detaited video overview of how to use a particutar program, no matter how obscure it seems. javatpoint.com ISAAC COMPUTER SCIENCE The perfect site to head to if you’re studying (or teaching) Computer Science at GCSE or above, as Isaac was developed together with UK exam boards in tandem with renowned computing companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Raspberry Pi. isaaccomputerscience.org…

MAKER magpi.cc/wordclock If you want to know the time, there are many methods available to you. Perhaps you’d like to glance at a digital or analogue clock or watch. Maybe you’d like to ask your favourite virtual assistant to read it out loud. If you’re feeling bold, you consult a sundial, a time ball or a merkhet. Or, if you’re Christopher Hall, you could use a word clock and see the time as written sentences. Word clocks are not new but they sure are fun, and Christopher’s entry goes further than most. As well as telling the time, it announces holidays and birthdays by shining LED lights behind specific letters and numbers on a custom-made panel. Everything is controlled by a Raspberry Pi computer. “When I thought of the project,…

MAKER mustardcorner.com Keeping corals healthy is a tricky task. As well as requiring the right temperature and proper aquarium lighting, corals need a balanced healthy diet and extremely precise water chemistry. Joe Stiff, who keeps corals and macroalgae in 7.5-litre and 41-litre salt water tanks is fully aware of this. “Dosing various ions such as calcium and magnesium, as well as other chemicals, is necessary when taking care of corals,” he says. Rather than pay anywhere between £80 and £500 on a commercial dosing pump, however, he decided to make one himself. By using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller, along with good-quality relays and pumps, he has been able to create a driver for a fraction of the cost - just £14 in total. He has also done so without…

MAKER magpi.cc/brachiograph Many of us remember being shown, or even making, pantograph pen plotters from the days before graphing tools were part of a standard home or office computing feature set. Open-source computing guru Daniele Procida recalled just such a device when considering a low-tech example of what Raspberry Pi could be used for while planning for the PyCon Namibia conference. The result, BrachioGraph, which sketches portraits and reproduces images of objects, was an instant hit, inspiring a fan following of keen makers. Noting the contrast between the resources typically available at conference events in the UK and Europe and those in African host nations, Daniele says: “It’s one thing doing things with robotics if you’ve got access to 3D printers, laser cutters, and off-the-shelf parts and components; quite another…

MAKER magpi.cc/hauntedowlbear You’ll Need GeorgiGerganovs port Amicrophone(for live transcription) Speech recognition is massively useful, from providing accessibility features to people with deafness and reduced hearing to transcribing meetings, lectures, or personal audio notes. It’s also the technology that underpins most personal digital assistants. But between services that leverage cloud processing and those that phone home with telemetry data and voice samples for later analysis by humans, it’s hard to find transcription services that keep your personal recordings fully private. So we’re going to build our own offline transcriber. Whisper.cpp isn’t perfect. It can’t distinguish between different speakers and, like most transcribers, it can get confused by cross-talk and indistinct enunciation. However, its performance rivals that of many commercial services, and your data never leaves your hands. 01 Prepare your system…

Our program turns the LEDs all the way on or all the way off. This is fine for us, and we can control the brightness by picking the right resistor. However, you can control the brightness of LEDs by flicking them on and off really fast. This is known as pulse width modulation (PWM). Pico W does support PWM but is limited to just 16 pins, so we can’t use it in this project. We could create a PIO program that took in details of all the pins that should be on, and do a global PWM across all of them, but this is more than we need.…

The MagPi | INTERVIEW Name Trevor Warren Occupation Software engineer Community role Community leader URL hack2.live We love High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) we’ve been covering it in The MagPi basically as long as the magazine has been around. When Trevor emailed us about some launches he’d been doing in Australia, we were keen to talk to him, finding out he’s set up several coding and making-related volunteer groups over the years. “I have always been playing around with Linux and open source growing up,” Trevor tells us. “Linux was my gateway to learning more about computing and how computers worked… hardware was expensive and not really affordable in those days, the only way to dabble with electronics was to build everything yourself from scratch or use expensive commercial platforms which…

N64 Digital HDMI converter Using older consoles with an analogue output on modern TVs is fraught with various quality issues. However, this amazing project uses a Pico to convert the signal better than some solutions. magpi.cc/n64hdmi Solar rover If there’s one way to explore the Australian outback without being attacked by natural horrors, it’s through the safety of a video feed attached to a remote-controlled robot. magpi.cc/solarrover Train logger User iHoller913 was interested to know if there was any pattern to the trains going by their home, resulting in this professionallooking device. magpi.cc/trainlogger…

The MagPi | THE FINAL WORD Raspberry Pi is as much a community as a computer, and I am utterly overjoyed to see the return of the brilliant Events pages to this magazine (page 92). Rob Zwetsloot runs our community section and will be a familiar face to most of you. Rob loves Raspberry Pi and our community and is - I’m sure - as happy as I am to see real-world events taking place again. Raspberry Pi itself is deeply connected with industry professionals and enthusiasts, and a new Events section can also be: found on Raspberry Pi’s website (magpi.cc/events). Here, you’ll find Raspberry Pi at industry trade shows and hobbyist events. Kicking off with Embedded World 2023, where you can meet Raspberry Pi makers. Eben Upton will be…