Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #155

Editor Lucy is reminiscing about ‘Arms’ the poorly named robot arm she once built and stuck googly eyes on. rpimag.co My kind of fun isn't settling in to a TV binge, though many of my friends adore it. My happy place is here with my keyboard, diving into nerdy books, comics, or leaping into a video game! So, for someone like me, the thrill of crafting an Ultimate Home Media Centre, like the sensational one PJ has whipped up for us this month, is the pure joy of ‘building’ even more than the ‘playing’. Who wouldn't be utterly captivated by what it offers? Off-the-shelf systems often feel like they're playing catch-up. Some boxes might shy away from BBC Sounds with its HTML5 heart, YouTube comes and goes, and ITVX can…

Argon 40 has just placed its upcoming Argon ONE 上 UP laptop on Kickstarter (rpimag.co/argonupks). Built around Compute Module 5, the laptop promises to be “powerful, modular, and built for makers, developers, and tinkerers.” “For years, Raspberry Pi users have wanted a real laptop – not just a DIY workaround,” writes Joseph Zapanta, chief operating officer at Argon 40. We've waited for this moment Powering the portable The Argon ONE 上 UP laptop (上 also means ‘up’) is powered by Raspberry Pi's Compute Module 5. This provides all the powerful hardware features of Raspberry Pi 5 in an embedded board. CM5 is available with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, up to 16GB SDRAM, and up to 64GB of eMMC storage (rpimag.co/cm5). Compute Module 5 features the Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76…

An event is broadcast to the device to wake it up It's been just over a year since Raspberry Pi launched the Connect beta, giving you simple, remote access to your Raspberry Pi straight out of the box, from anywhere in the world (rpimag.co/connect). The response from users has been fantastic, and Connect has rapidly reached an install base of over 100,000 devices. Raspberry Pi is excited to announce that following the recent release of version 2.5, it's dropping the ‘beta’. Smarter wake-ups Prior to version 2.5, the Connect client software running on a Raspberry Pi device connected to the service would continually poll Raspberry Pi's servers for requests to connect. This worked well for us because it was easy to scale – traffic was a predictable shape; there was…

Raspberry Pi and SECO have announced that Clea is now natively available for Raspberry Pi OS. Roger Thornton, director of applications at Raspberry Pi, calls it a “partnership that brings together Raspberry Pi's powerful, flexible computing platforms with SECO's expertise in edge computing and HMI (Human-Machine Interface) solutions.” SECO's Clea (clea.ai) is a software suite designed to build and manage Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions. It integrates edge computing, cloud services, artificial intelligence, and device management into a unified platform. “This streamlined integration makes it easier than ever to develop and deploy industrial applications, pairing the performance and reliability of Raspberry Pi with the advanced management capabilities of Clea,” writes Thornton on the Raspberry Pi blog (rpimag.co/cleanews). “Industrial developers want to move fast without compromising reliability or security,” says…

Maker Electronic and electrical engineer Pete works for Avanade, and has been an enthusiastic user of Raspberry Pi since its 2012 launch. rpimag.co/avanade Keen gardener King Charles III famously promoted the idea of talking to plants in a 1986 episode of children's TV show Blue Peter. This same idea could be found at this year's Chelsea Flower Show, where technology company Avanade embedded sensors in trees and used an app to prompt conversations about each tree's health. Alongside this, Avanade's Pete Gallagher created a bespoke Pollinator Camera, based on Raspberry Pi 5 and the Hailo AI accelerator, to photograph and detect the number of insects visiting the show garden each day. The Intelligent Garden won a Gold award for Best Construction at Chelsea Flower Show. Trees, please School children and…

Maker Johan is a student and passionate maker from Switzerland. He's always loved building things, and started working on the first prototype of BaBot as a high school project six years ago. ba-bot.com Have you ever seen a robot that can play catch? Well now you have. This is BaBot – a fully open-source robot built by architecture student Johan Link. And it's absolutely ingenious – there's no camera here to keep track of the ball, as you might think at first glance. Instead it uses a matrix of infrared LEDs and phototransistors to detect the position of the ball. The LEDs emit light, and the phototransistors measure what's being reflected – in a way, Johan has created a very simple version of an eye, with the photoresistors standing in…