Innehållsförteckning för #141 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

Artificial Intelligence remains the hottest topic in technology. Especially generative AI, a new piece of tech that promises to do all the creative work for us while we sit on the beach. Hurrah! Of course, it's never that simple. There are ethical conversations surrounding generative AI, something that – as a technology – is both complicated and opaque. Who knows what is going on inside? KG does, that's who. Our Raspberry Pi AI Made Clear feature (page 30) demystifies artificial intelligence by showing you how to develop generative technologies using Raspberry Pi and open-source software. Create personal image diffusers, generate large language models, and assemble intelligent-acting robots, cameras, and speech assistants. All while keeping one eye on the ethics at play! With The MagPi magazine you will understand AI without…

MAKER Rolf Jethon enjoys using hardware and software to overcome problems as well as perfecting his clever ventriloquist designs bechele.de Puppets and play are always popular at children's parties, and the concept struck maker Rolf Jethon as an equally fun diversion for his father's birthday celebration. The hand puppet he made for the occasion was a hit, but Rolf found himself tongue-tied, somewhat muting his own experience: “Though I thought I was prepared well, I forgot part of the text, couldn't master the ventriloquism and the performance stuck several times.” As a technical engineer of many years, Rolf decided to use Raspberry Pi to add motion and speech to the existing doll, named Mr Bechele, and have it make another appearance, this time at his mother's 80th birthday party. Although…

MAKER Iestyn is an engineer with an interest in climate science. He's part of a volunteer group of people seeking to help researchers maintain coral for study. magpi.cc/coolcoral As the climate around the globe changes, nature itself is being affected. Ocean reefs and their coral are just one of the ecosystems under threat, so research into them is very important. “Field experiments involving coral in tropical climates are increasingly hampered by heatwaves – and that's a pleasant turn of phrase,” Explains Iestyn Jones, a member of the volunteer group CoolCoral Project. “Basically, unpredictable heatwaves cause unpredictable temperature shifts that can overwhelm and, more often than not, kill coral samples and render oceanographic experiments fruitless.” These fatal heatwaves are becoming more regular due to global warming, however the device the group…

One of the most genuinely beneficial developments to have come from machine learning is the ability to run offline tools that can provide sophisticated, accurate text transcriptions of spoken word audio and which can read text for you. While the latter has unfortunately led to a boom in annoying synthetic-voiced videos, it's genuinely useful when under your control. We're going to install Speech Note (magpi.cc/speechnote), a capable neural speech synthesis text-tospeech (TTS), speech-to-text (STT) and machine translation tool that runs entirely locally to ensure your privacy, and set up the Orca screen reader with Piper TTS to give the accessibility tool a more modern feel. First, we'll set up Flatpak and install Speech Note via the terminal. Speech Note transcription Now reboot Raspberry Pi, then open a terminal and type:…

MAKER Lucy is editor of The MagPi and she is mostly functional. magpi.cc Functions are the beating heart of Python. They help you break down Python programs into small, manageable parts that can be easily repeated. They make your code more modular, and easier to understand. Some people like to think of functions like cutting and pasting. You write the code once (known as ‘defining’) and then paste the code (called ‘calling’). While this is helpful to start with functions are more powerful than cut-and-paste because they accept input and provide output. In this tutorial, we'll look at defining and calling functions with different arguments. Then we will use this to create an advanced version of the ToDo program from last issue that saves our list to a file, and…

Raspberry Pi 5 is one cool single-board computer, but it can look even cooler inside a smart case. More importantly, a case can also help it to keep the board cool under a heavy workload, by using thermal pads, a heatsink, fan, or a combination of all three. To test the cooling effectiveness, we performed a stress test using all four of the CPU cores at the default maximum of 2400GHz. We also checked the Wi-Fi signal to see if the case interfered with it. In addition, we assessed each case's capacity – for mounting a HAT etc – and the access to Raspberry Pi 5's ports. It's a best case scenario! Official Raspberry Pi 5 Case Raspberry Pi | magpi.cc/case £10 / $10 Coming in red/white or black, the…

INTERVIEW > Name André Costa > Occupation Tech support > Community role Stock tracker > URL rpilocator.com For a while it was a bit difficult to get a new Raspberry Pi. With the global supply chain still recovering from COVID, people who wanted a Raspberry Pi had to wait patiently for Approved Resellers to get new stock – or pay exorbitant prices second hand. This is where André Costa came to the rescue with rpilocator. “Sometime around November of 2021, I started on a project making a carrier board for the CM4 and I needed some units to test my prototypes,” Andre tells us. “That's when I noticed the availability of Raspberry Pi computers in general was low. Initially, I registered for stock notifications at a couple of authorised resellers.…

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've made. Here's a selection of some of the awesome things we got sent this month. Remember to follow along at the hashtag #MagPiMonday!…

THE FINAL WORD I've probably mentioned here before, or it may be just common knowledge because I tend to reveal too much personal information, but the editorial team on The MagPi and HackSpace magazines generally work from home. We all visit the main office once a month, but editor Lucy heads in every week because she's just that dedicated (and lives a lot closer than the rest of us [it's the free coffee machine – Ed!]). Anyway, Raspberry Pi recently moved to a new office, and for the first time since joining Raspberry Pi, I now have a desk! This has caused me a little bit of a quandary though. My desk in the office is my home away from home and I want to make it feel comfy and…

MAKER Oscar, 56, lives in Switzerland and likes to spend his time dabbling as a Maker. He has been collecting vintage computers for the last 30 years, going back further and further in computer history. obsolescence.dev Over the years, maker and retro enthusiast Oscar Vermeulen has wowed us with his faithful scale models of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) hardware. First came the PiDP-8, which paired a Raspberry Pi-based emulator with a meticulously recreated front panel to recreate the ‘blinkenlights’ experience. A few years later a more ambitious PiDP-11 project introduced a custom injection-moulded case for the PDP-8's big brother. Now, Oscar has completed his most ambitious project yet, a two-thirds replica of the PDP-10. Before we get to the project itself, we wondered why the PDP range had been recreated…

MAKER Brian is The MagPi's publishing director and a volunteer, and restorer at Rhode Island Computer Museum. jepSTone.net Alongside his day job as The MagPi and Hackspace magazines’ publisher, Brian Jepson likes to track down and restore old computers. As a volunteer at Rhode Island's Computer Museum (ricomputermuseum.org), he regularly rescues old computers “from 8-bit on up”. A favourite is the Atari ST line of 16/32bit computers which launched in 1985, featured Motorola's 68000 CPU range and, “uniquely, could be used with electronic synthesisers as well as in home computers”. Brian's mt32pi synth project shows just how well the 40-yearold hardware works with a thoroughly modern Raspberry Pi. Musical inspiration Brian used to enjoy playing music (and regrets not having kept it up) and was keen to add a vintage…

MAKER Long-time contributor to The MagPi, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. @philkingeditor CDP Studio is an ‘out of the box’ software development tool used by many companies to build industrial control, automation, and edge systems. Yet it's fairly easy to get to grips with its low-code programming environment. In The MagPi issues 116 and 117, we showed you how to deploy a couple of projects to a Raspberry Pi. This time, we'll be using CDP Studio and its Kinematics framework to program a Raspberry Pi-powered robot arm, the myCobot 280 Pi that we reviewed in issue 137 (magpi.cc/137), to perform a pick and place routine. If you don't have the robot arm, you can still run the project and record movement steps to…

01 The PCB is a simple design, but there are a lot of components. Getting LEDs to line up perfectly is challenging, so Oscar has included an extra board that holds them all when soldering. 02 Once the lights and the switches are soldered, it's time to connect them up with a small ribbon cable. This is a good time to test everything before mounting the PCBs. 03 In this step we see the keys mounted into the injection-moulded case. Now the light board will be mounted and Raspberry Pi 5 can be installed using a further backplate.…

MAKER Rich Mellor, a former solicitor from Walsall, is completely selftaught in computer programming having learned on the Sinclair ZX81 and QL. retroprinter.com Many people hate printers and that's putting it mildly. With every paper jam, every automatic update and every message that a single ink colour has run out forcing you to replace the lot, comes much gnashing of teeth and an uncontrollable urge to throw the contraption out of the window. It's why there are rage rooms inside which you can smash the things up with sledgehammers. And yet printers are still useful and that makes them even more annoying. Acknowledging the printer's worth – grudgingly, we'd suspect – is Rich Mellor, who has had handson experience with so many of them over the years, from the humble…

One of our favourite things to make with Raspberry Pi is a cool robot. Whether you're making them fight at Pi Wars or racing them in Formula Pi, it's an incredible way to learn about coding and making. We've put together a list of very different robots to give you some inspiration BurgerBot Inedible round robot This Pico-powered robot is small and compact, and a great base for expanding and building bigger and more complex robots magpi.cc/burgerbot PicoTico Tic-tac-toe-bot Would you like to play a game of tic-tac-toe? This robot will play with you, but unlike WOPR (from 1983's WarGames) it's a bit more physical magpi.cc/picotico NE-5 Who's Johnny? This compact robot inspired by Short Circuit's Johnny 5 is also powered by Raspberry Pi 5. It's a very advanced robot…

KEY BINDINGS This useful documentation page shows you the default keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio Code, and also how to change them. magpi.cc/vsckeys MARKETPLACE Browse the thousands of extensions available for Visual Studio Code, the vast majority of them free, with helpful filter and sort options. magpi.cc/vscmarket AWESOME VSCODE Want even more resources? Viatsko's GitHub repo has a curated (and long) list of useful links, helpfully arranged into categories. magpi.cc/awesomevscode…

Weather forecasting I am attempting to complete the ‘Build a weather station’ project by Phil King described on page 132 of the 2024 Official Raspberry Pi Handbook. I am having a problem which is described below. I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 with Bullseye. Per the instructions, I have set up Raspberry Pi, mounted the HAT, installed the software and rebooted Raspberry Pi. However, when I perform step four, ‘Initial testing’, I get the following error message: I am a Raspberry Pi neophyte, so I am unclear what the error message is referring to, much less how to troubleshoot it. I would be very grateful if you could give me some guidance on how to proceed. Mike via email With the ever-changing nature of technology, we discovered while helping…