Innehållsförteckning för #146 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

Our resident retro-gaming expert KG Orphanides has spent much time perfecting the art of attaching floppy disks and CD-ROMs to Raspberry Pi 5. When KG suggested a retro horror gaming feature for our October issue, we couldn't say no. The lure of revisiting multimedia classics such as Alone in the Dark and Phantasmagoria was too much to resist, and we hope you enjoy reading our spooky trip down memory lane. Meanwhile, Rob has chosen ten creative Halloween projects. So if you fancy building something special to scare trick-or-treaters, be sure to scope it out. This month's magazine has been a lot of fun to write. We hope you're enjoying our HackSpace integration. There's far too much inside the next 132 pages to outline everything, but I especially enjoyed the LEGO…

“You can dive into development quickly and efficiently” A few months back, we quietly dropped the Pico VSCode project on GitHub. It didn't take long before the feedback started pouring in. Since then, we've been listening and tweaking. Now, we're excited to officially unveil the public beta of the Raspberry Pi Pico Visual Studio Code Extension. So, what exactly is Pico VSCode? It's a Microsoft Visual Studio Code extension designed to make your life easier when creating, developing, and debugging projects for Raspberry Pi Pico-series boards. Whether you're a total beginner or a seasoned pro, this tool is here to help you dive into Pico development with confidence and ease. If you've ever tried to set up an embedded development environment, you know it's no small feat. Beginners often find…

MAKER Born in Austria, Michael was 12 years-old when he began programming in BASIC on a pocket computer. Today he works as a software engineer. magpi.cc/pi84portable As impressive looking as modern laptops are with their heights usually measured in millimetres, the chunkier devices of yesteryear still have the power to turn heads. Their solid builds gave the impression that you could drop them off a cliff and still manage to use them to write about the incident later. There was also something rather attractive about their no-frills, plasticky nature. It is to those bygone laptops that Michael Mayer has turned when creating his own portable classic. Named the Portable Pi 84 – by virtue of being driven by a Raspberry Pi 4 computer – it takes inspiration from the machines…

MAKER Nate is a retrofuturist and writes documentation for Raspberry Pi. lambdalatitudinarians.org You'll Need > Pico-series device magpi.cc/pico magpi.cc/pico2 > Micro USB cable magpi.cc/microusb The following tutorial assumes that you are using a Pico-series device; some details may differ if you use a different Raspberry Pi microcontroller-based board. Pico-series devices are built around microcontrollers designed by Raspberry Pi itself. Development on the boards is fully supported with both a C/C++ SDK, and an official MicroPython port. This article talks about how to get started with the SDK, and walks you through how to build, install, and work with the SDK toolchain. To install Visual Studio Code (known as VS Code for short) on Raspberry Pi OS or Linux, run the following commands: On macOS and Windows, you can install VS Code…

MAKER Sandeep is a principal software engineer at Arm. github.com/sandeepmistry Machine Learning (ML) technologies have revolutionised the way many software applications are developed. Application developers now curate datasets with numerous example inputs and outputs for a desired system, then use these datasets to train ML models. During training, the ML model learns patterns from the inputs and outputs. Trained models are then deployed to devices which perform inferencing on inputs from the real-world and use the ML model's predicted output to perform one or more actions. Smaller ML models that require kilobytes of memory can be deployed to microcontroller-based devices, like the Arm Cortex-M33-based Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller used in the new Pico 2 board (magpi.cc/cortexm33). Deploying ML models to microcontrollers enables systems to have lower latency, as the data…

One of the many great things about the EMF Camp events (www.emfcamp.org) is the swap shop tent where all kinds of things are brought to be sold and exchanged. On one of my many visits there I found a slightly worn (but very heavy) pair of joysticks which looked as if they had been part of a professional simulator at some point. In this article, I'll talk about how I reverse-engineered them to create a fully fledged flight simulator controller. Along the way I happened to create a Pico program that makes it easy to use any input device as a USB joystick. GETTING STARTED Figure 1 shows the joysticks as I found them. Ultra Electronics is a manufacturer of devices for the Ministry of Defence in the UK, so…

Raspberry Pi can be a lot of things – a home assistant, a home theatre PC, an alarm, a retro games console, or even just a regular PC. All of those things have one thing in common – they all use sound. Raspberry Pi is actually great with audio, and we've used this flexibility in many applications that require sound to be played. Like with a lot of Raspberry Pi uses, we can make it better though, through a selection of add-ons, HATs, and extensions to get the most out of Raspberry Pi's musical capabilities.…

We're positively petrified by the ghastly games featured in KG Orphanides' frightening feature on page 32. However, if playing vicious videogames isn't on your bucket list for Halloween, we have a scary selection of deliciously devilish alternatives that are sure to raise the dead. Red light, Green light Doll of doom The spooky doll from Squid Game has been recreated here as a 3D print, with glowing red eyes and the ability to turn her head through 180 degrees. I'm sure it will be fine if she catches you. magpi.cc/squidgame Remote Controlled Billy See him rolling This creepy Saw doll rides its trike thanks to Raspberry Pi-controlled motors that turn the pedals his feet are attached to, giving the illusion the doll is moving the trike on its own. magpi.cc/billysaw…

Hosted by friend of The MagPi Nai-Wen Hsu, these regular meetups in Taiwan also often feature Masafumi Ohta of the Japanese Raspberry Pi Users Group, another friend of this magazine. A recent event in August had Masafumi show up in person as the attendees talked about streaming music around their home, and the new Raspberry Pi AI Kit. FIND OUT ABOUT NEXT MONTH'S EVENTS AND POP-UPS ON PAGE 124…

MD Robot Kit A learning kit featuring many MD Robot kits, including the Compute Module 4-powered MiniPupper robots. “Go from zero to robot engineer,” it claims. “The affordable Turtle Bot and the Mini Pupper 2G are open-source. It's easy to master robotics from robot motion control, ROS SLAM&Navigation, and generative AI applications. Our open-source robots provide everything you need to get started and succeed.” kck.st/3XuzYcd Rainy UHF Series This range of RFID boards works with a wide range of microcomputers and microcontrollers, including HATs and other Raspberry Pi accessories. Apparently they can read up to 60 tags a second at a range of 3.2 metres that can be expanded with optional antennas. Very impressive. kck.st/4dMtEm2…

On 19 August, our flagship Raspberry Pi 5 family gained a new member. Priced at just $50/£47, the new 2GB variant continues our mission to bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience. It's been a little over ten months since we launched Raspberry Pi 5. In many ways, this is the product that finally delivered on the original Raspberry Pi dream: an affordable general-purpose desktop computer, indistinguishable from a traditional PC for most users, and bundled with all the tools and collateral required for a beginner to go from “hello, world” to a career in engineering. Raspberry Pi 5 is on the order of 150 times as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi that we launched back in 2012. Much of that performance increase comes from clever engineering,…

MAKER Cambridge engineering student Louis spent an incredible summer at Raspberry Pi HQ building all sorts of projects in the dedicated maker space. magpi.cc/pixieclock Maker and engineering undergraduate Louis Wood first encountered Raspberry Pi while looking for a low-cost microcontroller that could be programmed with Python for an A-level project. Inspiring plenty of envy, he's just spent six whole weeks ensconced in Raspberry Pi HQ's very own maker space building a range of Raspberry Pi projects including the LEGO Card Shuffler. Basing it around the LEGO Build HAT (magpi.cc/buildhat) helped him evolve and improve upon a design he and his Queen's College Cambridge university friends Lucas Hoffman and Emily Wang devised. The card shuffler idea was their response to a design and build challenge based around a LEGO NXT system that…

MAKER Thomas is a robotics enginner who grew up in Germany, did a master's degree in mechanical engineering and worked in Tokyo for two years. magpi.cc/ledbrolly Aside from being wet, rainy days are often dark and gloomy, seldom putting anyone in a particularly good mood. But imagine if your umbrella shone bright with an array of colours and had some snazzy light effects. Not only would that project a cool glow as you walk down the street, it would surely put a smile on people's faces too. Thomas Killus has created such a brolly using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board. It sends instructions to strips of standard WS2812b addressable RGB LEDs that run along the ribs of an umbrella, and this in turn brightly disperses light across the adjoining…

MAKER PJ is a writer, software engineer and home server enthusiast. (At least, his server's AI tells him he is) mastodon.social/@mrpjevans Previously, we have built our networkattached storage server and set up VPN access to your files from anywhere in the world. Now we're going to take it to the next logical step with a way to easily share your files with family and friends and let them upload files to you as well. We'll do this by installing a private server platform to your existing NAS and then adding new functionality. This will form the basis of the extra services we can add. So let's get started with the world of Docker and CasaOS. 01 Introducing CasaOS Rather than all those fiddly command line instructions, we're going to install CasaOS…

Jo Hinchliffe (AKA Concretedog) has a house and shed full of lathes, milling machines, 3D printers and more. Jo is a constant tinkerer and is passionate about making. He's obsessed with rockets and robots and much more besides, and often releases designs and projects as open source. In competition rocketry there are model rocket classes where people sometimes build super lightweight rockets by rolling thin card or paper into body tubes. Indeed I've been experimenting with this approach and even used my vinyl cutters to cut more complex transition cone shapes from card (Figure 2). This led me to the idea for the HEXA body tube. Why not create a rocket with a cut and scored foldable tube leading to a lightweight,interesting design? The HEXA consists of two card hexagonal…

Roughly half way between Leeds and Manchester sits the pretty town of Hebden Bridge. In the 1700s, enterprising young men in this part of the world tried to open-source the money supply of England by coining their own counterfeit currency, which worked well for a very short time, then went badly pretty quickly. A more sustainable approach to open source enterprises can be found nowadays at Wuthering Bytes, a festival of all things open that has been held here since 2013, with this year's festival also playing host to Open Source Hardware Camp 2024, organised by OSHUG – the open Source Hardware User Group. Wuthering Bytes bills itself as a festival of technology, which is a pretty broad target, but one that means it's packed with interesting stuff. Most of…

When we do home automation with lights, usually we're connecting to them via software to turn them on or off (or dim, or change colours, etc) as part of a big IoT network. We got an email from Nirvaan, 13, about his low-tech high-tech solution to home automation: physically turn the switch on and off with a Pico W on the Wi-Fi network. “I started out by making a smart light switch that uses two servos and a Pico W to connect to my Home Assistant (also Raspberry Pi).” Nirvaan writes. “When I pressed ON in Home Assistant (HA), the servo would press the light switch and manually turn it on! I coded this in MicroPython, using a web server to communicate with HA.” He went on to control a…

YOUR LETTERS Roadside telemetry I am interested in using a Raspberry Pi to send odometer readings from my car to another Raspberry Pi unit by the roadside. Do you have any projects that are similar that I could consult? Francis via email We did a big feature about car computers way back in issue 81 of The MagPi (magpi.cc/81) – car technology of that kind is an old standard so it should be a good place to start in terms of getting all the car telemetry you could want. You could probably use some GPS add-ons for other location-based information as well. As for transmitting to a roadside unit, projects with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi hotspots are a good start, however we'd be concerned with the amount of time that would…

MAKERS The research team from University of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute field-tested the Asian hornet detector in Jersey and Cornwall. magpi.cc/vespaigit Fun fact that might get you a point in the local pub quiz: Vespa, Piaggio's iconic scooter, is Italian for wasp, which its buzzing engine sounds a bit like. Less fun fact: nature's counterpart to the speedy two-wheeler has an aggressive variant that has been seen in increasing numbers across western Europe and which is a direct threat to bees (magpi.cc/beeshornet) which are one of their key food sources. Bees are great for biodiversity; Asian hornets (the largest type of eusocial wasp) are not. But it's only particular hornet species that pose such a threat. Most citizen reports of Asian hornets are native species and a key issue…

FEATURE Retro styled horror games for modern platforms are numerous and many of them are genuinely outstanding. It's a genre that lends itself to small-scale indie development effectively as it does to massive triple-A studios, and where art house or B-movie sensibilities can often hit harder than glossy big-budget production values. But to get a real handle on where modern gaming's obsession with retro horror comes from, it's worth taking time to visit the genre's roots. Although many older horror games can now feel stilted or clichéd, there's plenty to appreciate in terms of both their design, their clever use of the technologies available to their developers, and their writers' willingness to engage with some genuinely dark subject matter. For this latter reason, many of the games we've included received…

DOWNLOAD THE FULL CODE: magpi.cc/marsrov2 MAKER A long-time contributor to The MagPi, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. @philkingeditor Loosely based on NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars, the 4tronix MARS Rover is a six-wheeled robot with steerable wheels and a rocker-bogie suspension system that enables it to crawl over small rocks. In the first instalment (MagPi #145), we covered how to assemble the rover and control it manually from a remote computer using key presses. This time, we'll get it to move autonomously – first in preset patterns, and then intelligently, using the ultrasonic sensor on its mast to detect obstacles and take evasive action. We can even get it to navigate a simple maze. If you have a different wheeled robot, the same…

The surfaces on a gauging block are so smooth that it's possible to join blocks together using nothing more than a thin coating of oil. Joining blocks this way allows you to create stacks of blocks that have a non-standard size. Although it's counter-intuitive, a thin layer of oil on the surfaces will join the blocks together very firmly provided you use the proper technique. The technique is called “wringing”, and is easy to master. Step 1 Clean your gauging blocks with degreaser and then add a small amount of oil to the joining surfaces using a pad Step 2 With the pieces positioned at right angles to each other, apply gentle pressure and slide them together so that they form the shape of a cross Step 3 Keep applying…

Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. Her growing vintage stack of crafty tomes is making her very happy. QUICK TIP We used an old white tile to work on to protect our table surface. Great for leaving things to dry on too, once glued, painted, or grouted. The art of making mosaics has a long and rich history and, having covered the topic of tessellations very recently, this author thought it appropriate that we now take a look at the tessellation of small tiles, or 'tesserae,' from the Latin word meaning a small square or cube. Going back in history, Roman and Etruscan mosaics were created by highly trained craftsmen, their skills held in high esteem by their contemporaries. Many of us are familiar with examples of their intricate…

INTERVIEW > Name Natalie Turner > Occupation Graphic designer > Community role Magazine designer > URL magpi.cc As The MagPi grows larger with the addition of HackSpace, that means our team has grown larger so we can produce our fantastic new magazine for our readers. This includes having Natalie Turner join us as a full-time designer alongside Sara. “I have grown up around art and design from very young,” Natalie tells us. “My dad was a graffiti artist when he was younger, then became a graphic designer/web developer. He gave me access to his Photoshop where I got to explore digital art. I also grew up drawing a lot from manga books! After college I did an art foundation degree, which is where I decided I wanted to be a…

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 FINAL WORD This month Raspberry Pi released its latest model. And what was the new feature that sets this model apart from all the rest? More I/O possibilities? Greater security? A faster processor? The ability to handle AI, correct your spelling as you type or remind you when it's time to take the bins out? No: the big new feature of the new Raspberry Pi 5 is that it has less RAM. The latest version of the best-selling single board computer is now available with just 2GB of RAM, as well as variants with 4GB and 8GB. It's also priced at around £30 less than the 8GB version. It's refreshing that newer doesn't always have to mean bigger and better. I've been using a Raspberry Pi 4 for the…