Innehållsförteckning för #133 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

Retro computing enables us to experience a time when computers were more straightforward and more challenging. The modern technology stack is so detailed that it’s hard to fully comprehend, whereas older computers are much easier to figure out. And the games were terrific. Nostalgia is powerful stuff, and the technical achievement of 1980s games, combined with the level of challenge, is incredible. Classic computing is a huge hobby. And our resident retro expert, KG Orphanides, has written an Emulate Everything feature (page 36). It’s packed with information on all the different retro options, the legal status of the various systems, and where to get your retro games. Build a great system and happy gaming. EDITOR magpi.cc…

MAKER magpi.cc/pplib Although there are many handheld retro game consoles based around Raspberry Pi devices, we still want to play with more. They help to keep the memories of old machines and titles alive, while providing the perfect opportunity to dive into a project and learn more about what is going on under-the-hood. It’s this desire to understand that has driven Daniel Kammer to create Pico Held, a beautiful, open-source handheld with a Raspberry Pi Pico board at its heart. “There is so much you can learn from creating DIY projects,” he says. “By making it open-source, it also gives others the opportunities to learn – maybe they’ll help to improve Pico Held in the future.” Hold fire Before getting down to work, Daniel came up with some goals. “I…

MAKER vitoplantamura.com Artificial intelligence has garnered thousands of headlines over the past few years, intriguing and appalling people in roughly equal measure. AI art generation, whether musical, visual or written, has alarmed many a creator concerned about losing work, or having theirs ripped off. What we’ve seen little of, to date, is canny AI generators that can run on a computer with modest processing capabilities. Training AI models requires powerful servers and multiple dedicated GPU (graphics processing unit) boards to create the model that can generate images. After this training process comes “inference”, where a trained model is used to infer a result on a regular computer. Even this takes time on a powerful computer with multiple GBs of RAM. OnnxStream, however, makes inference possible on a tiny Raspberry Pi…

Warning! Observing Animals Do not bother animals in the wild more than you have to. Any observation posts should not disturb wildlife. MAKER It seems like we’ve been covering wildlife camera traps a lot recently but, to be fair, they’re all very cool. Philip Mill, a sound engineer with a love of wildlife, actually got in contact with us at the start of 2023 about his current project. Perhaps it’s inspired the last few months of articles? “Originally the project was created – and I generally referred to it as – ‘Badgercam’, but the current iteration is not at the badger location, so now it’s just Solar and Wind-powered sound recorder (with image capture),” Philip tells us. We think Badgercam rolls off the tongue a bit better though. “[This was]…

Most of the time your programs will not run, or run correctly, on the first pass. Do not worry. This is perfectly normal. Coding is sometimes described as the process of removing bugs (errors in the code). There are almost always bugs in everybody’s code at first. Our Hello World program is pretty simple, so you will most likely run it first time. But if you were to change it to something incorrect, such as using prin instead of print, the Shell will return an error message: Read the message carefully and you will get information about the error. In this case, it is on ‘line 2’ of our hello_world.py program. The line with the error is displayed and a hint to the problem: NameError: name 'prin' is not defined.…

raspberrypi.com Our previous Camera Module tutorials have spent some time explaining how to capture camera images in different ways, but we haven’t yet shown how you can take control of the camera itself, and the images that it delivers. There are a number of different ways that we can control the behaviour of the camera, so we’re going to divide them into three groups: 1. Image readout controls. The orientation in which images are read out and how we can zoom into different parts of the image. 2. Camera controls. Various controls for the camera itself, such as the frame rate, exposure, white balance, and autofocus. 3. Image processing controls. Finally, we have a number of options for how the captured images can be tweaked, such as increasing the sharpness,…

HOW LINUX WORKS Subtitled ‘What Every Superuser Should Know’, Brian Ward’s 464-page tome is very thorough, delving into Linux’s inner workings, yet wellstructured for dipping into whenever you need it. magpi.cc/howlinuxworks LINUX BIBLE Now in its tenth edition, this comprehensive Linux user guide requires no prior knowledge, but is packed with essential info. With an emphasis on commandline tools, it’s largely distro-agnostic. magpi.cc/linuxbible THE DEBIAN ADMINISTRATOR'S HANDBOOK Written by two Debian Linux developers, this is a superb resource for anyone using a Debian-based distro such as Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu. Read it online, download the PDF, or buy the book. debian-handbook.info…

Held regularly in Taiwan, these community gatherings have people come and show off their projects and talk about how they work. This recent event, from the end of July, also featured friend of the magazine Masafumi Ohta from the Japanese Raspberry Pi User Group. FIND OUT ABOUT NEXT MONTH’S EVENTS AND POP-UP ON PAGE 94…

MAKER hackaday.io/yutasuito Warning! Mower safety Fast-spinning lawnmower blades are very dangerous and can also eject debris at high speed. magpi.cc/mowersafety Living in a mountainous region of Japan has proved inspiring for maker Yuta Suito. The local area has many rice terraces but, as he explains, “With the ageing of the farmers, this beautiful landscape will disappear in about ten years. Many farmers say that the hardest part of maintaining the terraced fields is weeding.” Determined to try and help, Yuta wanted to “solve this problem by providing mobility (with no need to bury boundary wires underground) and intuitive operation (in reality, many elderly people cannot use smartphones or computers).” The result is the lightweight, solar-powered Roktrack pylon-guided mower, and it’s perfect for rough terrain. Prompted by a road construction site,…

MAKER mattg.co.uk NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is a satellite that sits between the Earth and the sun, where it is ideally placed for solar research, and provides early warnings of solar winds (that can affect power grids and communication systems). DSCOVR also hosts a camera called EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) which is positioned so it can always see the sunlit side of Earth. “EPIC takes beautiful photos of the planet every day, and I wanted a way of displaying the latest photos in my home,” explains renowned YouTuber MattGrayYES. Since NASA allows you to access their EPIC photos from your code using their Blue Marble API (magpi.cc/epicapi), it was clearly feasible. When Matt saw the 2.1-inch HyperPixel Round Touch Display in the Pimoroni shop (magpi.cc/hyperpixelround), he decided…

MAKER kevsrobots.com Many readers will be familiar with maker Kevin McAleer’s endearing robots and other inventions, either through reading The MagPi or enjoying his wonderful YouTube broadcasts which enthuse about all things tech. Earlier this year, he designed and built a Pico-based companion named Bubo 2T. This second companion, Chip (magpi.cc/chip), is so-named because it will sit on its maker’s shoulder (insert pun here). Whereas Bubo was a social media maven, tweeting out missives, Chip is more of a ‘cute interactive humanoid pal’. He’s got a Raspberry Pi RP2040 board inside in the form of a Pimoroni Servo 2040, chosen for its 18 servo sockets, and senses the world through an ultrasonic range finder. Walk the walk Kevin wanted to create a small bipedal robot so he could develop his…

Recalbox’s attractive and easy to navigate EmulationStation-based front-end design works particularly well on handhelds and arcade machines, and custom versions are available for a range of retro console hardware kits, many of which are autodetected in order to load appropriate controller configurations. Recalbox also makes the RGB Dual HAT, custom hardware that adds high-quality CRT display output to Raspberry Pi, and that’s only fully supported in this distro, so far. The disadvantage is that Recalbox ships with a fixed range of emulators that you can’t add to, upgrade, or downgrade independently of the OS. However, scores of different emulators are included, including non-default alternatives that you can manually select to try specific games with. recalbox.com…

MAKER magpi.cc In this, the first of a series of tutorials, we’re going to look at learning to use Python to create a variety of practical projects. We’ll cover all the basics, from creating your very first program to understanding how variables work, understanding flow and loops, and understanding mystifying subjects like object-orientated programming. Along the way, we’re going to try and keep things as practical as possible, exploring what you can make with Raspberry Pi and Python, from building web-based software to electronic gadgets. To begin, we’re going to write our very first program! Let’s get started… In this tutorial, we’re going to use Raspberry Pi OS to practise Python. Raspberry Pi OS has Python pre-installed alongside a programming tool called Thonny. Thonny is a type of program known…

Coding is one of the most important skills you can learn in the modern age. On a practical level, learning to code enables you to control a computer and get it to do things for you, whether it’s building a website, making games, or scripting boring tasks so the computer does them for you. The good news is that coding proficiency does not require genius, just as literacy doesn’t require brilliance. The process becomes relatively straightforward once you grasp fundamental concepts like variables, branching, and loops. If you can read and write, you can code. More importantly, learning to code teaches you critical thinking skills that help you understand how the modern world works. Code is a critical layer in our lives that sits between us and the increasingly digital…

MAKER seeedstudio.com You'll Need > reTerminal DM magpi.cc/reterminaldm > 150 mm of 20 mm × 20 mm aluminium frame > 4 × right-angle brackets to fit > Nuts and bolts > 3D-printed parts > 4 × 12 V DC peristaltic pumps > 12 V power supply > Various jars, pipes, metal straws, and drinks to fit > STL and code files: magpi.cc/rebtgit During the celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival at Seeed Studio, a booth was set up to serve drinks with an automated cocktail machine and named reBartender V0.1. The prefix ‘re-’ is commonly used to mean ‘again’, and Seeed Studio created a product line called reThings to evoke ‘redefine’, and includes products like reTerminal (which we reviewed in The MagPi 122 (magpi.cc/122) and the latest reTerminal DM (Device Master). They’re both powered by Raspberry Pi Compute…

PIMORONI → £39.90 | hsmag.cc/M5Stack The PoECAM-W is an open-source and programmable camera that integrates PoE (power over Ethernet) and Wi-Fi giving you plenty of connectivity options. The brain of the product is an ESP32 board with an integrated webcam and W5500-embedded Ethernet controller. You get a 2-megapixel image sensor, 8MB PSRAM, and 16MB flash large memory. This could be a good addition for monitoring your outdoor space for pesky intruders, capturing timelapse videos of the growing season, or just seeing what’s going on outside. It’s easy to deploy since you can program it via the Arduino IDE or ESP-IDF. And, of course, you must consider how you will make it waterproof, but that could be as simple as mounting it to the inside of a window in your house…

AUTHOR Cindy Quach Price: Free linuxjourney.com One of the most popular operating systems in the world, Linux comes in a wide range of varieties, known as ‘distributions’ or ‘distros’. Raspberry Pi OS is based on the Debian Linux distro. Therefore, learning more about Linux can help you get under the hood of your Raspberry Pi, understand how it works, and make the most of its capabilities. Available in several languages, the Linux Journey website is a great place to start. Billed as helping you to ‘learn the ways of Linux-fu’, it’s organised into levels of expertise – from Grasshopper, though Journeyman, to Networking Nomad. Each level has a number of lesson modules to explore different aspects of Linux. Topics range from the command-line interface, text manipulation, running processes, installing packages,…

The MagPi | INTERVIEW > Name HannahMakes | > Occupation Special Effects Technician > Community role YouTuber | > URL hannahmakes.com Sometimes you find out that you’ve been training your whole life for something, and it becomes a fantastic new hobby. For us, and many of you reading the mag, that ended up being making. “I grew up really fond of crafts and obsessed with tech, but I didn’t really figure out how to put the two together until much later,” Hannah explains. She makes excellent videos, as HannahMakes, about her wonderful contraptions. “I happened to be working for New Scientist magazine when I started hearing things about the maker movement; people using a blend of traditional techniques and tech to build awesome things at home. It felt like something…

Memory Box This is apparently the creator’s first project, and it looks great. It’s a wooden framed ‘Memory Box’ which responds to NFC cards to show videos of specific memories. It’s easy to disassemble for maintenance, and makes a nice little bedside clock too. magpi.cc/membox BMO upgrades We featured the BMOctoprint a while back in the magazine. It’s very cool and cute. Allie has recently upgraded it with a Jake the Dog (another character from Adventure Time) themed carrier seat so they can take it DragonCon. katzcreates.com…

01 Kevin details the build for Chip (Cute Humanoid Interactive Pal) here: magpi.cc/chipgit. You will need to 3D-print the parts; the STL files are at magpi.cc/chip. 02 The 19 servos are attached to a Pimoroni RP2040 Servo board via its headers, while attaching an IMU sensor helps keep Chip surroundings-aware and, therefore, upright. 03 The head unit’s ultrasonic distance sensor doubles as eyes. The fully assembled Chip has 18 different degrees of freedom, but loves to gaze at the world from his maker’s shoulder.…

Raspberry Pi can be fully transformed into a DIY multi-console, thanks to three polished emulation-oriented operating systems: RetroPie, Recalbox, and Lakka. They’re all excellent and include a wide range of emulators, a notable number of which are maintained by the Libretro project. All three are available as image files that you can both download and write to an SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager (magpi.cc/imager). Once you’ve connected them to your network, you can just browse to their SMB shared directories from any computer, and drop your ROM and BIOS files over to play. CHOOSING YOUR PERFECT DISTRO All three retro gaming distributions support a wide range of controllers, including USB and Bluetooth console pads, retro joysticks, and full arcade setups connected via USB or GPIO. You can use a…

Raspberry Pi stemmed from a desire to counter a decline in computer science engagement at Cambridge University. Eben Upton, and a host of other engineers, decided that a small hackable computer, reminiscent of the computers they grew up with in the 1980s, was the very thing. Raspberry Pi went on to capture the heart of the maker community due to its affordable and customisable nature. It was a big hit with enthusiasts because of its capacity for building and experimentation, blending hardware and software harmoniously in exciting projects. Raspberry Pi is the ideal computer for learning to code. It is a low-cost computer that is simple to set up. Raspberry Pi runs Linux, a free operating system that’s loved by coders. And you can hook up electronic components to its…

MAKER penguintutor.com twitter.com/stewartwatkiss You'll Need > MCP3008 ADC magpi.cc/mcp3008 > 2 × 10K potentiometers magpi.cc/10kpot > Mini breadboards magpi.cc/minibreadboardwhite This game of bat and ball is based around a Raspberry Pi with potentiometers for the paddle controllers, to mimic the classic game from the 1970s. As a Raspberry Pi does not include any analogue inputs, an analogueto-digital converter is used. This uses the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) which provides a way for a computer or microcontroller to communicate with integrated circuits and other devices. Python and Pygame Zero are used to create a graphical display with the Pong-style paddles and ball. 01 Raspberry Pi This project features a Raspberry Pi computer, which has an operating system and more processing power than Raspberry Pi Pico. It can connect direct to a screen…

Raspberry Pi Projects The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s learning resources website is an excellent place to get started with programming on Raspberry Pi and using it in a wide range of electronics projects. You can filter projects by topic, hardware, software, and difficulty level. Enjoy creating a laser tripwire, a burping jelly baby, and a pixel pet, just to name a few. magpi.cc/projects The Pi Hut Tutorials As well as selling a massive array of Raspberry Pi-related products, The Pi Hut has an extensive learning resources section on its website, filterable by hardware or programming language. You’ll discover a whole load of useful Raspberry Pi tips, tricks, and guides, along with how to connect and use various electronic components. magpi.cc/pihutguides Raspberry Pi Books We don’t like to boast, but we’ve produced…

@devinck I’ve covered gardening-related electronics a few times, including wireless sensors, and a host of outdoor-related devices. And since spring is here, it made me think it’s time to look at the possibilities of remote sensing again. I have always wanted to bring a little IoT to my own garden, and hopefully this is the year I do implement some kind of electronics. The past few years have been difficult to tackle that project since components, especially microcontrollers, have been difficult to come by, but that’s finally changing. You can source microcontrollers and some single-board computers of various flavours at most of the online shops, and even a few brick-and-mortar retail shops. And I’m seeing new sensors being made available every week that would be perfect for remote monitoring. Even…

The Linux Command Line AUTHOR William Shotts Price: $39.95 / Free (PDF) magpi.cc/linuxclbook While most Linux distros, including Raspberry Pi OS, offer the option of a GUI, the command line is where you can really get into the internal workings of the system and use powerful text-based commands to control every aspect. One of the best resources for learning about it is William Shotts’s comprehensive 555-page guide, which covers the same material as the LinuxCommand.org website, but in much greater detail. The free PDF, now in its fifth edition, is divided into four main sections. Part one covers topics such as navigating the file system, manipulating files and directories, permissions, and processes. Part two introduces text editors, with a detailed section on vi, and prompt customisation. Part three covers common…

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!…

The MagPi YOUR LETTERS #MagPiMonday: how to be in the magazine I’ve been wanting to share something for #MagPiMonday, and I was wondering if there are any specific requirements to get featured in the magazine section with pictures of them? Jude via Threads We don’t have any specific requirements to get into This Month in Raspberry Pi – as long as you have a nice photo of your project and we think it’s cool, it will usually make its way in. The limiting factor mostly is page space. We try to limit it to one post per person in an issue too. Either way, it’s mostly a way for you to show it off on social media. #MagPiMonday: other social media I’m moving away from Twitter or X, or whatever…

The MagPi THE FINAL WORD I’m currently in the process of building a Pikon Camera. This is a homemade digital camera with a 3D-printed case, LCD screen, battery and – of course – Raspberry Pi (magpi.cc/pikon). So far, I’ve created the 3D-printed case in two options: one for Camera Module 3 and one for High Quality Camera, and I’ve assembled all the parts. It charges and powers up well. To a mother, all children are beautiful, but I’ll be the first to admit my lovely camera is a little wonky. The software side of things is a bit of a struggle at the moment as well. The 3.5-inch WaveShare screen has a resolution of just 480 × 320. This is fine as a preview window, of course, but it’s smaller…