Innehållsförteckning för #158 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

rpimag.co At last! I can finally talk about the incredible new computer that Raspberry Pi has been working on. I am writing this on my brand new Raspberry Pi 500+ in Pi Towers, Cambridge. I’ve got a matching one on my desk at home and am syncing the two together. These are my computers now. Everything I write is done with a Raspberry Pi 500+. The keyboard is amazing. An absolute joy to type on. The whole computer is self-contained within the keyboard design, and it’s incredibly fast. Thanks to the 2.4GHz Arm CPU, 16GB RAM, and an M.2 NVMe SSD, it skips along without missing a beat. Even if 500+ was running Windows or macOS, it would be swift. But because my 500+ is running Raspberry Pi OS based…

rapidlab.io Parrots may not be a common sight in Poland, but the city of Gliwice is home to an Ecuadorian restaurant named after the bird (‘loro’ in Spanish), and its owners thought a talking parrot could make for some effective marketing. The Locoloro street food restaurant sells a fairly traditional range of empanadas and other South American snacks and dishes, which visitors to the city will remember thanks to its distinctive parrot logo. Using Raspberry Pi and AI to bring the iconic bird to life seemed like a fun but memorable way of piquing customers’ interest and entertaining them while they queued. Talking point Gliwice is a small but thriving city in Upper Silesia, Poland with plenty of hospitality options, but a harsh climate. The attractive medieval city attracts plenty of…

rpimag.co/ubopodks As Google, Facebook, email clients, and any number of persistently connected devices hoover up our details and interactions while ‘summarising’ and providing ‘assistance’ crafting responses, many of us are keen to safeguard access to our innermost thoughts, dashed-off notes, and utterances. A device that provides centralised control over a customisable range of smart devices, and can be voice controlled but, crucially, doesn’t share its owner’s data, has clear appeal. Mehrdad Mazjoobi believes he’s come up with just such a device – or one with potential to offer such tools – and recently launched a Kickstarter to support its further development after garnering interest at various trade shows over the past two years. Ubo Pod is “an open-source, hackable, multi-modal personal AI assistant” primed with a 5MP camera, 32GB to store…

rpimag.co/camerahacksmj In the olden days, we’d point our cameras at scenes, press a button, then have to wait to get the film developed so we could see if the photos we’d taken were any good. The process was slow, and it forced the user to be selective and deliberate with what they were doing. Nowadays our cameras are our smartphones, and we hardly even look at the photos we take, still less print them out and have them around the house. One maker who wanted to go back to the way things were is Malcolm Wilson. Malcolm’s a prolific camera hacker, adding 3D-printed bits, Raspberry Pi Camera Modules, and copious amounts of Python code to get things to work just so. This is his latest build: it’s based on a Raspberry…

rpimag.co/MiniLab Here’s a snazzy solution to the problem of too many Raspberry Pi computers cluttering up your workspace – put them in a custom 3D-printed case. Reddit user and IoT developer RetroArchangel printed this rack with space for six Raspberry Pi machines, plus a HAT for each one, and added OLED status screens for each one. They designed and printed the mounting for the camera mount and the 7-inch LED screen, and all together it’s a powerful, neat development lab for development – they’re currently using it to work on a “couple of AI vision projects… and a device to encourage social engagement by people in cognitive decline.” The Raspberry Pi computers in the build are five Raspberry Pi 4s, each with a PoE HAT (that way, they can all be…

We are pleased to finally reveal the latest Raspberry Pi computer: 500+. This is the machine we have been waiting to share for over a year. It offers “uncompromising performance, perfectly tactile.” In the words of its engineers: This is the “dream machine”. And this is the one that the editorial team want to use to code and write with. Raspberry Pi 500+ puts the power of Raspberry Pi into an ergonomic and tactile mechanical keyboard with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD. If you’ve ever wanted a modern-day Linux machine that you can plug in and start using for product development, coding, circuit building, and engineering, this is the perfect computer. There are no compromises with Raspberry Pi 500+. The mechanical keyboard features Gateron KS-33 Blue keys…

about.me/RichardSmedley The Unix family of operating systems, which includes the Unix-like GNU/Linux and also Apple’s macOS (which is licensed to use the UNIX trademark), deals with data from commands as streams of text. This means that commands can be chained together in countless useful ways. For now, though, we’ll focus on giving you a firm foundation to building your own custom commands. Getting our feet wet When a command is called at the terminal, it is given three streams, known as standard input (stdin), standard output (stdout), and standard error (stderr). These streams are plain text, and treated as special files. As we noted last issue (rpimag.co/157), ‘everything is a file’: this is what gives Unixlike systems the ability to put together simple commands and programs to build complex but reliable…

glowingart.co.uk YOU’LL NEED 4 × 9g servos Raspberry Pi Pico (any version) Halloween skeleton 2 × WS2811 fairy lights Distance sensor Backing wood (ply or OSB) Screws Black paint As October draws to a close, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grows thin, allowing spirits to cross. At least, that’s what watching too many horror/comedy films has taught us. Since the real world is rarely as interesting as Hollywood depicts, we’re not going to rely on the dead rising up, and give Halloween a helping hand by creating our own animated skeleton. You can build your own by following along, or adapt the techniques to animate whatever spooky (or not spooky) decorations you like. Our build starts with a 90cm glow-in-the-dark skeleton that we purchased from…

Brazil | flori.tech Flori is the brainchild of Thaís and Gabriel who entered a ‘cleantech cluster’ hackathon in Rio challenging entrants to come up with a means of tackling waste. It’s a vast issue in Brazil, since only 3% of the country’s waste is disposed of properly. As well as the environmental cost, there’s a potential R$14 billion that could otherwise be earned from recycling materials. Flori realised that gamifying the sorting of everyday waste such as drinks cans could have an immediate impact and transform the depressingly poor levels of recycling. After plenty of research and brainstorming, the duo came up with a 500 litre-capacity smart waste collection machine that accepts paper, plastic, metal, and glass. The user initiates the disposal process by either logging in via the unit’s touchscreen…

France | mycoho.eu Animal lovers are wont to pay close attention to the needs and health of their trusty companions. In the case of horses, they don’t spend all day, every day in close proximity to their owners, but the bond between horse and rider is often profound. French company Animalinks came up with a natty way to monitor the day-to-day health of equine friends, using a Raspberry Pi 4-controlled ‘intelligent camera’ that roughly resembles the shape of a horse’s hoof. Coho is designed to be installed in stables and wirelessly send back time-lapse images or live videos along with health data. The setup allows for Raspberry Pi to control up to five cameras per stable and send live updates about each horse ‘direct from the stall’. There are also fittings…

For portable projects, space is typically at a premium. Trying to cram in a Raspberry Pi computer isn’t always possible. Even a Raspberry Pi Pico, roughly the size of a stick of gum, may be too big for some projects such as wearables. So, for those times when you need something a little smaller, we’ve rounded up some of the best tiny boards around, all based on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 or RP2350 microcontroller chip, as used in Pico and Pico 2 respectively. As you’d expect, a smaller footprint necessitates some compromises, such as a reduced number of physical pins available to break out the processor’s GPIOs. While this may well be a key factor when choosing a tiny board, most of them offer a good range of I/O functionality,…

Pimoroni | £15 / $17 | pimoroni.com Verdict Ideal for lighting miniature models and LEGO. This RP2040-based board is focused on delivering mini LED lighting suitable for LEGO kits, doll’s houses, and miniature models (as in a tutorial this issue). You can even add audio thanks to its onboard 3.2W I2S amplifier, by connecting a mini speaker. At 31.2 × 23.2mm, it’s not the smallest board on test, but still very compact. Instead of GPIO pins/holes, it has six two-pin JST-SUR ports along one edge, for connecting single-colour LEDs, plus a four-pin RGB connector – which can be used with a mini multi-way adapter to control multiple RGB LEDs. Pimoroni stocks mini LEDs with JST-SUR connectors, or you could adapt standard ones to fit. A Qwiic / STEMMA QT port…

concretedog.blog-spot.com It’s amazing the things people have done with Raspberry Pi. OpenFlexure is an open-source project aiming to make high-quality microscopy available to all. Whilst our hardware hacker forebears used lathes and milling machines to cut and form and grind out manual microscopes, OpenFlexure makes use of affordable electronics and access to 3D printing. The main project of OpenFlexure is the OpenFlexure Microscope, and at first glance, if your knowledge of microscopes is limited to things you directly look through, you might wonder what on earth it is. Consisting of a big pile of 3D-printed parts, there’s no obvious eyepiece. That’s because this microscope captures images and delivers them to your connected monitor, or indeed another computer networked to the scope. Before you download and start printing, there are a…

So, Raspberry Pi 500+ has launched and this is the last word in our Raspberry Pi 500+ special edition. It’s been a fantastic time to work on a Raspberry Pi magazine. Over the last few months we’ve seen Raspberry Pi 500+ come to life: slowly teased out through various test units with niggles smoothed and kinks ironed out. Doubtless we will discover more about this incredible device over the next few months, but for now we’re just going to enjoy seeing it glowing on the cover. I’m not personally done with my Raspberry Pi 500+. I have a 1TB SSD that landed on my desk today, which I’m going to place into my 500+ as a demonstration of how to upgrade the drive. I’m not totally sure what I will do…

rpimag.co/verticalrunner Many Raspberry Pi projects are created for use in the real-world. Not Vertical Runner. This one was designed as a film prop for a short science-fiction thriller that James Reeves was writing with his wife. It was set to star a lonely, introverted, skilled hacker looking to access rare cars and it was going to be shot at night. “I wanted a really strong title sequence showing our main character coding, printing, and assembling and I wanted something unique as her main hacking tool,” James says. “It needed to be an extension of the main character and look great on film at night, perhaps in a phone booth, around a corner, or adjacent to a neon sign.” James also wanted his device to double as a principal light source…

mitchelltechnologies.co.uk rpimag.co/bogbody We last encountered Sean Tracey engaged on an international trade mission somewhere between London and San Francisco, stealthily trying to set up a Raspberry Pi cluster computer in an anonymous-looking briefcase with the aid of some rather whiffy spray paints without attracting the attention of the conference hotel staff. This issue, he’s left the latex special effects to the theatrical pros while he takes on the task of animating a fake 1000-year-old corpse with a little help from Raspberry Pi. Deadly serious Sean helped attract attention to a previous company he worked for by animating a cutout of Elvis Presley and placing it in the office window, where it would follow people as they walked by and block their view of what was going on inside. Whether this had…

rpimag.co/Kilopixel Here’s a project that has it all: loads of physical building, G-code, sensor data flowing into a Raspberry Pi via GPIO, and a Python script running on Raspberry Pi that queries an API to determine which pixels to move. Plus, it’s enormous, and the aforementioned API takes input from the internet, so that humans on the other side of the planet can control what image is displayed. No wonder it took Ben Holmen six years to build. This 1,000-pixel wooden display is, as Ben says, “inefficient”. But that’s exactly what he wanted to make, inspired by similar projects including a movie player that updated at 24 frames per hour. This display comprises a grid of 40 × 25 pixels, updating each pixel ten times a minute; compare that with a…

dantonmedia.com When Konrad Zuse’s parents gave their young son a metal toy construction set – much like the Meccano sets popular in Britain and the USA at the time – they had no idea that they were sowing the seed for the world’s first binary, programmable computer. For Zuse, with help from family rather than companies, friends rather than universities, created a series of machines that could rival any of their contemporaries. If he had been based in Boston rather than Berlin, there’s every chance that his most admired computer, the Z3, would be as famous as the ENIAC. And that Konrad Zuse, the man, would be as well-known as John Mauchly in the US and Alan Turing in the UK. For now, though, let us spare a thought for his…

Waveshare / The Pi Hut | £5 / $6 | waveshare.com / thepihut.com Atiny board at a tiny price, it measures 25.5 × 18mm. Some space is saved by the omission of an onboard USB-C port – instead, it’s on a separate adapter board which you can connect using an FPC ribbon cable when you want to program the RP2040 Tiny in MicroPython, CircuitPython, or C/C++. The adapter board also features boot select and reset buttons. While this may seem a rather odd arrangement, the upside of losing onboard USB and buttons is that there’s more room for I/O pins: 23 of them. Located around three edges, they include an impressive 19 GPIO pins, encompassing four analogue inputs and two channels each of SPI, I2C, and UART, plus all 16…

Adafruit rpimag.co/fruitjam $39.99 SPECS DIMENSIONS: 86 × 54 mm STORAGE: 16MB flash, 8MB PSRAM, SD card slot I/O: DVI port, STEMMA QT, STEMMA Classic, EYESPI, 5 × NeoPixels, 3 × buttons, Wi-Fi adapter Verdict Adafruit’s Fruit Jam is well thought out on both the software and hardware sides, to deliver a machine that’s easy and fun to hack on. 10/10 What is a computer? What is a microcontroller? And where do we draw the line between the two? There are some technicalities that can try to point us in one direction or another, such as whether or not it includes a Memory Management Unit (or MMU). However, this sort of technical distinction misses the point. We’re not really interested in dictionary definitions here, but more the question of what the word…

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. Follow along to #MakerMonday each week over on our various social media platforms!…

rpimag.co/instcamzero Warning! Burn Risk This project includes a thermal printer (EM5820) which becomes hot during operation and may cause burns if touched immediately after use. The first ever commercially available instant camera was released in 1948. Created by Edwin Land, it was manufactured by Polaroid, sidestepping the need to spend ages processing traditional film in a darkroom. At first, the Land Camera would output sepia-tone prints. Two years later, it was printing in black and white and, by 1963, it was surprising consumers with colour. But even though the popularity of instant prints waned in the 1980s, there’s still no mistaking the joy of being able to see an image form before your eyes in double-quick time. It’s why, despite having a pick of amazing digital cameras – including those…

Way, way back in issue 141 (rpimag.co/141) we featured a fun, very low- cost project by maker Leo where he used recycled cardboard and a Raspberry Pi Pico to create an analogue throttle for flight sims. It was simple but effective. Leo is now back with something a bit more complex – a switch panel for controlling the radio in flight simulators. “I thought it would be really cool to have a physical interface that mimics real aircraft controls for various simulator actions,” Leo says. “Off-the-shelf solutions were very expensive, so I knew I’d have to make my own… Originally, I was planning to use a wooden box from a local craft shop, but after seeing an autopilot panel shown by VIZIX on YouTube (rpimag.co/autovizix), I saw that 3D-printing the panel…

smt.codes In this tutorial series, we are going to learn to make Python games with Pygame. Pygame is designed to make it easy to create games and interactive software. We’ll look at drawing, animation, keyboard and mouse controls, sound, and physics. Each tutorial will add to our knowledge of Python game development, allowing us both to understand the games we play, and to create almost anything our imaginations can come up with. This series isn’t for absolute programming beginners, but it’s not far from it: we’re going to assume that you’ve written some simple Python (or similar) programs in the past and are able to create files and get around your computer’s file system without too much difficulty. Installing Python and Pygame Both Python and Pygame are installed on Raspberry…

@nicoladj100 QUICK TIP We found that superglue may be more effective to use than any glue provided in a kit, so have some to hand. These kits also leave some room for creativity on the part of the maker In case you weren’t aware, miniature rooms and doll’s houses in general are having something of a ‘moment’, with makers young and old alike. Your author was first alerted to the trend a couple of years ago while wandering around our local garden centre. For those not based in the UK, garden centres here often seem to make more revenue from ‘bought in’ goods – such as jigsaws, and overpriced candles, toiletries, kitchenware, and leather goods – than they do from plants and gardening paraphernalia. Their tearooms are often quite enticing…

China | rpimag.co/myarm300 With seven degrees of freedom (most robots offer up to six – the extra flex comes from the articulated elbow), Elephant Robotics claims that myArm allows movements “as flexible as a human arm” and is the most portable desktop robot arm available. Indeed, the very purpose of the unusually naturalistic-looking arm is for educational settings, whether robotics, ROS simulation or logic control. Demonstration videos show myArm picking up and gently placing bricks into a small bucket and picking up slim plastic pucks and rotating them through an arc before slotting them into a Connect 4 frame. The arm has clear gaming and industrial uses, especially when paired with items from Elephant Robotics’ range of accessories such as fixed bases, grippers, and being used onboard an AGV (automated guided…

USA | persys.ai Persys is a Raspberry Pi 5-powered ‘local AI inference device’ on which data is processed locally, ensuring no-one can snoop on what you’re saying or scrape the conversation details. We recently tried out a demo of a similar device by Plaud, but Persys has the advantage of powerful Raspberry Pi processing as well as the all-important Powered by Raspberry Pi badge. Persys is designed to be a personal cloud device that acts as a companion to your smartphone or laptop. You can discreetly consult it for definitions and references as well as pop culture details safe in the knowledge your enquiries won’t be shared. Better yet, it has onboard storage so you can save photos, music, documents, contacts, chats and more, with 1 and 2TB configurations available. Since…

More on the Enigma machine In the last magazine you are describing the Enigma machine. The article is interesting; however, your editorial comment has historical flaw re who broke the Enigma code. According to historical sources, “the code of the German Enigma cipher machine was first broken by Polish cryptologists, partially by a team of mathematicians from the Cipher Bureau of the Second Department of the General Staff of the Polish Army: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski. They achieved this in the early 1930s, several years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Their work and knowledge were passed to the Allies, including the British.” I understand your British roots as a company, but it would be good not to distribute misinformation related to history and to…