Innehållsförteckning för #129 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

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),…

Is your garage door not pulling its weight? Add some smarts with this home automation tutorial and take control You'll Need RaspberryPiPico W SBElectronicsRelay for Pico Bellwire(length depends on your installation) Motorisedgaragedoor HomeAssistantserver MQTTbroker Top Tip Add a sensor Use a simple contact (or reed) switch, like those used in alarm systems, to detect whether the door is open or closed. Then you can send specific ‘open’ or ‘close’ instructions rather than a toggle. 01 Make a (safe) plan This project is aimed at garage doors with an operator, a motor that opens and closes the door via a remote control. Most operators have their control box near the ceiling in the centre of the garage. Typically, there’s a light embedded in there too. Nearly all models have two terminals inside…

MAKER @philkingeditor You'll Need CosmicUnicornorGalacticUnicorn (Pico W Aboard) Blunicornfirmware Laptoptabletor smartphone with Bluetooth As the French trio Stardust once sang, “music sounds better with you”. It also sounds better when you have an audio visualiser creating cool-looking, on-the-fly lighting effects reacting to the sound. The good news is that you can turn a Pimoroni Galactic or Cosmic Unicorn LED matrix display into a Bluetooth speaker with real-time visual effects. While you can easily run the ‘Blunicorn’ music visualiser by downloading the firmware and flashing it to the Unicorn’s integrated Pico W, we’ll show you how to edit one of the effects and add an extra one by editing the code on GitHub. 01 Download Blunicorn firmware The Galactic and Cosmic Unicorn displays come with Pimoroni’s own custom Pico…

There has been a lot of talk here about reading and writing RFID cards, but very little about what that actually means. RFID cards come in a variety of different standards, using a number of different frequencies and protocols. This project uses an RC522 reader, which works at a frequency of 13.56MHz and is used with classic MIFARE-type cards that have 1kB of memory. These are the sort of cards that you find used as travel passes or printer/photocopier credit cards. The memory is arranged into 16 sectors, each of which contains four blocks of 16 bytes. The first three blocks are data blocks that are used for storage, but the fourth block is an access control block, which defines how the information in that sector can be accessed. Writing…

1. 0.96-INCH OLED 128×64 monochrome display to show text, sensor readings, and simple graphics. 2. RGB LED Addressable WS2812 RGB multicolour LED with output connector. 3. LED & BUTTON Red LED and push-button. 4. TEMPERATURE & HUMIDITY SENSOR Standard DHT11 sensor. 5. RELAY Relay switch with two terminal block connections. 6. MOTOR DRIVER Dual H-bridge for connecting two DC motors or servos. 7. IOT BOARD Connections for optional ESP8266 Wi‑Fi and HC06 Bluetooth modules. 8. BUZZER Active piezo buzzer for making simple sounds. 9. LIGHT SENSOR Light-dependent resistor (LDR) for detecting light levels. 10. POTENTIOMETER Variable resistor with rotary knob.…

RASPBERRY PI SENSE HAT PIXEL TUTORIAL Carrie Ann Philbin shows how to set up the pixel display on your Sense HAT and create a pixel pet. The avatar pet moves when you shake the device, demonstrating one of its many sensing capabilities. magpi.cc/sensehattutorialyt ELLORA JAMES SENSE HAT Ellora James is a great video blogger who explains clearly how to go about setting up a Sense HAT for the first time, and provides a video tutorial that follows the instructions and code on the Raspberry Pi website. It’s ideal viewing if you want to take your first steps into using HATs. Ellora also has plenty of other useful Raspberry Pi YouTube guides. magpi.cc/sensehatej THE RASPBERRY PI SENSE HAT IS AWESOME! ETA Prime takes you through the LED matrix and all the…

01. Exeter Pi Jam Saturday 6 May Exeter Central Library, Exeter, UK magpi.cc/exeterjam129 First Saturday of every month, a group of enthusiasts of all ages bring their projects or just come along to make, learn, and talk. There is a range of equipment for people to try or use to work though projects. Come and see, and have a chat. 02. Melbourne Raspberry Pi Meetup Sunday 7 May Docklands Makerspace and Library, Melbourne, AUS magpi.cc/mrpm129 This meetup is open to everyone with an interest in electronics, robotics, home automation, 3D printing, laser cutting, amateur radio, high altitude balloons, space tech, etc. Makers are invited to bring along their projects and project ideas, and come connect with other makers. Get your questions answered, show off the work you are doing, and…

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…

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 cornucopia.co.uk What do you want to do when you retire? Some might want to relax, others might like to travel. Carl Nicholson had a different idea. “When I retired and moved back to the UK, I wanted to do something that would raise awareness of climate change and help people understand the ideas behind green energy,” Carl tells us. “I also wanted an excuse to do electronics, maths, coding, and making physical models and equipment.” The result of this was Greening the Spark, a “simulator of a National Grid designed as a handson museum exhibit which can also be played as a game,” as Carl describes it. Carl comes from a background of making and simulators, working in space operations in Munich, training astronauts and flight controllers on the…

Home automation has such a broad scope that it is only limited by your imagination. Most people start by controlling lights, but soon you can be monitoring all kinds of things, responding to different inputs, creating scenes and more. So here are some of our favourite types of smart devices and suggestions on what you can do with them. Everything here will work with Home Assistant. Voice control There are many different voice control platforms available. The most popular are Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. Home Assistant has direct support for Alexa and Google Assistant via integrations so you can control your devices or trigger automations by voice. For Siri, you create a link to HomeKit and create voice-activated short cuts. Home environment Our homes are filling up…

MAKER magpi.cc/owlbear You'll Need AnOpenAIaccount Thonny Aninternetconnection In this tutorial, we’ll be creating a simple chatbot interface in Python using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Large Language Model (LLM) to create a local interface and instructions (a ‘prompt’) for a chatbot that behaves similarly to OpenAI’s famous ChatGPT. You’ll need an OpenAI account to use the gpt-3.5-turbo model required by this tutorial. You’ll also need to keep Raspberry Pi connected to the internet as the models we’ll be using have to be accessed via an API that communicates with OpenAI’s servers, both because of their proprietary nature and to give Raspberry Pi the extra processing power necessary to run a viable GPT-3 chatbot. 01 Create an OpenAI account Go to platform.openai.com/signup and follow the instructions to create an account. Users must be over 18.…

MAKER raspberrypi.com You'll Need RaspberryPi CameraModule RaspberryPiOS In this tutorial, we’ll introduce you to the range of different Raspberry Pi cameras and talk you through the particular features and benefits of each one. We’ll show you how to connect them to Raspberry Pi and test that they are working correctly. Finally, we’ll finish with a couple of simple examples to show you how to capture your first photo or video. This is the first part of a series of tutorials that will take you through Raspberry Pi cameras, from absolute beginner to advanced Raspberry Pi imaging techniques. Raspberry Pi has made five different types of cameras, of which all but the original v1 camera are currently in production. Some of them come in two or more different variants. Compatible camera…

The RC522 RFID reader modules use the SPI interface to communicate with the Raspberry Pi Pico. SPI is a popular and well-established protocol that lets you connect multiple devices together on a single bus to reduce the overall number of lines used to communicate with the processor. Although some devices can be daisy-chained to reduce the number of connections going to the master device, many (including the RC522 modules used in this project) are independently wired, with each connection being connected to the same pin on the next board. The SPI interface needs several connections to function properly, some of which are shared between boards. These are usually labelled MISO, MOSI, and SCLK. MISO stands for Master In Slave Out, and is the connection that sends information from the slave…

you can do pretty much anything with a Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi Pico, even try and improve your fitness! Whether you’re tracking your fitness more closely, getting a more efficient workout in, or just making a treadmill a little more entertaining, there’s definitely some way you can use a Raspberry Pi to improve your fitness journey. We’ve gathered some of our favourite projects together to help you get you in tip-top shape. Grab your trainers and let’s make some gains.…

AUTHOR Raspberry Pi Foundation Price: free magpi.cc/gettingstartedsensehat Now we’ve whetted your appetite about things a Sense HAT can do, head to this useful guide to set up. As this guide explains, the Sense HAT contains a number of on-board sensors to measure temperature, humidity, colour, movement, and orientation, and also has an LED grid to display the results of your investigations. With its origins as a sensing device destined to go into space with the European Space Agency, and as a teaching aid as part of the Astro Pi project, there’s little the Sense HAT can’t do. This tutorial walks you through displaying text, images, and measuring the orientation of the Sense HAT device, before detecting movement using the joystick for input, and putting it all together to create your…

The MagPi | INTERVIEW > Name Brian Jepson | > Occupation Publisher > Community role Maker | > URL jepstone.net "I grew up in the smallest state in the US (Rhode Island) during the golden age of Radio Shack,” Brian Jepson tells us. He’s the new publishing director here at Raspberry Pi Towers, but he’s an old hand at making. “I’ve been a lot of things over the years, but if we go back to the beginning, I’d say I’m a computer programmer and tinkerer,” Brian continues. “I got my start programming on a somewhat customised Atari 400 with Atari BASIC, Forth, and a smattering of 6502 assembler. I kept up with that kind of thing over the years, and ended up programming for a time, then writing, and eventually…

The Magpi | THE FINAL WORD This issue, I wrote a feature about getting fit with Raspberry Pi and it reminded me of the fitness concept of how rest is equally important as actually working out. In terms of your body, exercising depletes you of resources and damages muscle fibres – resting allows you to get your energy back, and for the muscles to repair stronger than before. On a basic level, making sure to take breaks while making can be a safety precaution. Nobody should be soldering while they can barely stay awake, after all. More importantly, sometimes you need to put some space between yourself and a project to allow your brain to rest. Constantly hitting it against a problem you’re having is hardly a good way to…

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…

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…

MAKER bugg.xyz The louder the dawn chorus and the cacophony of wildlife, the better the locale and, by extension, life for the creatures that dwell there. This is a simplified take on the importance of acoustic monitoring, as conducted by Bugg.xyz using a Raspberry Pi-based system. Bugg wildlife traps record the sounds of the forest, and are AI-trained to listen to the quietest creatures, as well as those that broadcast their whereabouts to all and sundry. In fact, it’s more of an acoustic census, creating detailed records of the particular soundscapes of contrasting habitats, noting changes that may indicate deforestation or a natural disaster leading to depleted biodiversity. Dr Sarab Sethi, an environment research scientist at Imperial College London, developed the Bugg acoustic monitoring system, which is now being used…

Once you’ve begun your home automation journey, it’s only a matter of time before you come across MQTT. It may at first seem a little confusing and you may find yourself wondering why you need it. MQTT is a simple, lightweight messaging protocol whose purpose is to break the direct links between devices. We call this ‘loose coupling’. Why is this a good idea? Let’s say you have a temperature sensor. By sending its data to the MQTT server instead of, say, a display, this means we can have any number of devices ‘listening’ to the sensor and taking action. The sensor’s code doesn’t need to change if new requirements come along. Devices that send information are ‘publishers’ and those listening are ‘subscribers’. Publishers don’t care where the information is…

MAKER penguintutor.com twitter.com/stewartwatkiss You'll Need 6Vbuzzer Arcadebuttonswith 5 V LED 2N7000MOSFET 470 and 10 kΩ resistors PCBswitch ULN2803integratedcircuit Variouswires including crimp connectors Inputs and outputs are the ways that a Raspberry Pi Pico can interact with the outside world. In this tutorial, you will learn about pull-up and pull-down inputs and how to connect arcade buttons to a Raspberry Pi Pico. You will also learn about driving a buzzer using a MOSFET transistor. You will then learn how you can swap the MOSFET for an integrated circuit to create an interactive game to play with friends. 01 Switches as inputs The digital GPIO pins on Pico can have two different values. One is a high input where the input is at, or near, 3.3 V. The other is a low value…

Detecting cards is part of the game, but so is creating some meaningful feedback for the user. LED lights and buzzers are one option, but you can also use a sound module like the ISD1820 or ISD1932 to make the game more distinctive. These modules allow you to record sounds using a microphone, and play them back in part, or in full, by triggering a pin high. The exact recording time and number of different sounds stored will depend on the version of the chip and the configuration that you’re using, but you can easily record several sounds to reward your players. One consideration with these modules is that they aren’t very loud, so you will need an amplifier if you want big sounds for your game.…

There are many things to keep in mind when starting to work out, and the information can be a lot to parse as well. We have some tips to get you going, but make sure to do your own research. Health and fitness You know your body better than anyone, so if you have any health issues or concerns, you should consider them before exercising. Seek medical advice if you’re not sure Listen to your body Don’t push yourself through pain Make sure to rest properly Stretch before and after exercising Perspective People treat many metrics as proof of health and fitness. Not everybody is the same though, so make sure you don’t beat yourself up for not fitting certain categories. Weight is not always a correct measure of health.…

Sense HAT AUTHOR Raspberry Pi Price: free magpi.cc/sensehat The Raspberry Pi Sense HAT is an add-on board for the Raspberry Pi, designed to provide a range of environmental sensors and input/output capabilities. It was originally developed for the Astro Pi mission, a project by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the European Space Agency (ESA) to send Raspberry Pi computers to the International Space Station (ISS) for educational purposes. Start out with the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT product page. Here you will find more information on the components, a link to buying a Sense HAT, along with links to Astro Pi, the Python library, and the Sense HAT Product Brief.…

Cheap Oscilloscope Ed Mikkelsen emailed us about this cool project. “I wanted to build my own oscilloscope with inexpensive parts, and do my own programming. I also wanted to see how fast I could make it. I first programmed the oscilloscope in C++ using GTK for the graphics and achieved a conversion rate of 8 usec. I also programmed it Python with a considerably slower conversion rate because Python is a scripting language. With C++ I have also added a second trace, zero crossing detection, and automatic refreshing. All in all, loads of fun.” magpi.cc/github129 Internet/Local Network Monitoring Service A great network monitoring setup was sent to us by John Loop, which he described as such: “Completely self-contained performance monitoring setup. Does not rely on third party servers. GREAT use…

The Magpi | YOUR LETTERS Readall solution In the latest The MagPi correspondence, Marian asked “you could print articles on the following: gpio readall - the installation of and usage of as a means of checking the status of inputs and outputs.” When WiringPi was deprecated, I wrote a Python replacement for gpio readall. I have since written versions for many of the popular libraries (including my own pi_gpio). This has the advantage of displaying the ACTUAL programmed GPIO function (if changed) and pulls (on Raspberry Pi 4). I have been playing recently with the gpiochip interface (included in recent kernels) and realised that the raspi-gpio debug tool actually has all the details needed. raspi-gpio should be included in all recent Raspberry Pi OS, but if not you can install…