Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #129

Computers should be put to work, and we think Home Automation is a fun way to get our little computers to do some heavy lifting. Our resident home-hacker, PJ Evans, has put together a great feature about getting Raspberry Pi to open the curtains, manage the garage door, and turn the lights on (page 34). Meanwhile, Rob Zwetsloot has written an excellent article on Getting Fit with Raspberry Pi (page 66). It’s the perfect way to combine Raspberry Pi’s mental stimulation alongside looking out for your physical health. I’ll leave you to it. Meanwhile, we’ve got some amazing projects this month. KG Orphanides is on-the-ball with a tutorial on how to set up ChatGPT API on Raspberry Pi (page 42), there’s also a LEGO brick that plays DOOM (page 16),…

MAKER MAKER shilohstudios.us When you need to add remote control and automation that is easily customisable, as readers of The MagPi, you’ll understand the desire to do it with Raspberry Pi, which is what Michael Peters of Shiloh Studios figured out too. “Shiloh Studios is a Dante-based audio production facility which leverages the latest technology best practices and solutions to ensure the highest-quality experience and outcomes for its clients,” Michael says. “As the studio project design was unfolding, several challenges were encountered. After extensive research and assessment of numerous potential solutions, Raspberry Pi hit all the marks as the answer.” The different Raspberry Pi solutions were pulled off by Darrell Lehman, also of Shiloh Studios, who has been making Raspberry Pi-based projects for over five years, and has been working…

David Packman is a former Microsoft program manager responsible for chatbots, virtual assistants, and AI copilot projects, who builds companion robotics in his spare time. MAKER magpi.cc/clippygpt Trying to think of something to write can be hard (a fact that feels very much true right now, given that this is the fifth stab at penning an intro!). But imagine how much harder writing would be if you had a peppy paper clip in your eyeline chirpily offering hints and tips. “Do you need assistance,” it would say, as soon as you so much as tapped a single letter. And if you didn’t need help right at that moment, then it’d be sure to ask you again later! For users of Microsoft’s Office 97, this became a reality courtesy of an…

01 Once the keyword is recognised (this is carried out offline using a keyword recognition routine and a locally stored training model table), a speech recognition routine runs and Clippy gives its eyebrows a wiggle! It’s ready to help! 02 After listening to what is spoken until there is a pause in the speech, there are more I movements to let the user know the question has been heard. The speech is transformed into text and the speech recognition stops listening 03 The text is sent to ChatGPT as a prompt and the text answer is sent to the next routine. The text is then fed into the Text-To-Speech routine which displays the response on the screen and replays it as audio.…

MAKER magpi.cc/ancientj We’ve seen portable games projects before, but nothing quite this small! Maker James Brown took on the huge challenge of embedding a playable game of the classic first-person shooter Doom in a LEGO brick, powered by Pico’s RP2040 chip and featuring a tiny OLED screen. James makes clear that it was an iterative process over many months. The first version (magpi.cc/firstlegobrick) was “very simple and not particularly well-planned. I figured I’d make a tiny computer, attach a 0.42˝ LED which just (only just!) fits in the face of a LEGO slope brick, and somehow encapsulate it in resin to look like the original. So, I drew up a PCB as big as I could go without it sticking out, populated it with the smallest microcontroller I could find…

MAKER magpi.cc/michaelklementsyt As you might infer from a word prefixed with ‘cyber’, cyberdecks have their origins in the world of 1980s science-fiction. This particular version, however, harks back to the early 2000s when PDAs were a must-have business accessory, but the iPhone (and as such, smartphones) had yet to launch. Maker Michael Klements chose a clamshell version of a BlackBerry and paired it with Raspberry Pi 4 for maximum computing power, aiming for “a functional desktop computer with a GUI”. Michael has tackled a fair few Raspberry Pi and other microcontroller projects over the years. As well as the sheer number of projects that can be undertaken, he notes the helpfulness and knowledge of the Raspberry Pi community when a build proves especially challenging. The BlackBerry clamshell cyberdeck project provided…