Innehållsförteckning för #160 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

rpimag.co It’s that time of year when the snow starts to settle, the days are short, and the nights are mostly spent putting up gaudy decorations, watching television, playing video games, and getting ready to eat far too much food. Before that though, there is the annual buying of the presents. We love Christmas here at Raspberry Pi. Rob loves Christmas more than all of us combined, so he and Rosie have put together a massive Christmas shopping and projects feature. Give somebody the gift of a better, and more fun, computer or treat yourself to a new project. Ben has finished his Christmas lights tutorial so you can make the winter nights look a bit warmer with NeoPixels. There’s also a quiz of the year for you to put…

rpimag.co/drumcard Want to drum your name into someone’s memory at a network event? Then Sergey Antonovich has you covered. The embedded systems engineer has reinvented the age-old business card by turning it into a playable electronic drum kit – and we’d hazard a guess that this one won’t end up languishing forgotten in someone’s pocket. Sergey got the idea for the project some months ago. He enjoys building digital musical instruments including ultra-portable all-in-one digital accordions and he was inspired by business cards which fit an entire Linux system on a tiny PCB. Producing a business card which could be played felt like a natural fit. “It does three jobs at once,” he says. “It instantly grabs attention when you hand it over, it communicates exactly what I do, and…

Inspiration for makers, coders, inventors, smart home converts, gamers Christmas is the perfect time to gift someone you love – possibly even yourself – some tech goodies to make life go with a swing and divert you with tinkering and creative possibilities. If family members have been hinting hard about the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi goodness, these very pages should serve as inspiration for makers, coders, inventors, smart home converts, and gamers of all stripes.…

DreamHAT+ £100 / $135 dreamboards.co.uk Personal radar is a relatively new means of location tracking that lends itself well to indoor scenarios such as Supersense’s Sens2 hub to benignly monitor dementia patients (rpimag.co/sens2) or to tracking pets and other creatures in a defined area. Setup involves installing the preconfigured microSD card, then running through tutorial videos on Dream RF’s YouTube channel so you understand the classic Doppler and azimuth graphs that the 60GHz millimetre-wave radar has uncovered. Pimoroni Grow HAT Mini £33 / $43 rpimag.co/growhatmini Grow your own herbs, chillies, and vegetables with the aid of this moisture-sensing kit that will alert you should your plants be crying out to be watered. The Grow HAT comes with three capacitive moisture sensors that act like smart plant labels. (Fret not, the…

rpimag.co At the heart of each AI system is its model. This is the engine that makes the AI work. There are different types of models for different tasks. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are great for images; Large Language Models (LLMs) are great for handling text, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) models are great for environmental interaction, such as teaching a robot to walk. Typically, when using AI in a project you will use a model that has been pretrained by somebody else. A language model developed by OpenAI or an image classifier developed by Sony, for example. Or you can take a model and adapt it to your needs. In this tutorial, however, we are going to train our own model using images and TensorFlow code. We will then compress…

philkingeditor.com Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins aren’t just for outputs like LEDs – they can connect to inputs, too. Consider the simple push button, which can be used to trigger other components or functions. Let’s connect a button and write a program to print a message when it’s pushed. After that, we’ll use it to light an LED, then add a second button for a fun twoplayer reaction game. Connect the button Shut down your Raspberry Pi and unplug it from power before building your circuit. Connect the LED as shown in Figure 1, remembering to add a resistor for its ground connection. Add the push button to the breadboard as shown in the diagram, with its pins straddling the central groove. Connect a pin-to-socket jumper wire from one pin’s column…

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!…

Trixie I don’t understand a lot of the stuff that goes on underneath the surface when it comes to computers, but I do know that newer is better. So a new operating system [the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS, which we wrote about last issue], has got to be a good thing. By coincidence, last month saw the end of support for Windows 10 – if you want to upgrade to Windows 11, you need a whopping 9GB of space just to install the bare OS. David, via email We’re so used to using Raspberry Pi as a platform for other things that we can sometimes forget that it’s a great computing platform in its own right. The fact that you can get new versions of the operating system…

At the start of October, we released the Trixie version of Raspberry Pi OS. One of the changes we made was to revamp the Bookshelf application to give contributors access to subscriber-only titles, so we thought we’d talk a bit more about that decision. Distribution change Some time back, we made a change to how our e-books were distributed. Originally, we made all the PDFs of our books available for free on the day they were released, but in 2023 we began expanding the distribution of our print and electronic titles. Before then, our only third-party distribution was through resellers and booksellers in the UK and Ireland. We were entirely absent from e-book channels like Kindle, Google Play Books, and Apple Books, and our print titles were not reliably available…

Put a 3D printer to work on these baubly nice Christmas decorations: rpimag.co/printdecs Bambu A1 Mini £169 / $179 rpimag.co/a1mini Bambu has become one of the go-to maker brands, helping 3D printing become increasingly affordable as well as sophisticated. The four-colour A1 lets you print multi-coloured designs (albeit more slowly than single-colour prints), but it's the unbelievably affordable A1 Mini that really impresses us. It works out of the box, the software is intuitive, it's quiet – altogether it's a great introduction to 3D printing. CrowPi 3 AI Learning and Development Station £168 / $229 rpimag.co/crowpi3 CrowPi 3 turns Raspberry Pi 5 into a portable lab in which to experiment with everything from engineering and advanced tinkering to making sense of the world via machine learning and OpenCV AI processing.…

Master of gift-giving: Rob Zwetsloot Depending on how highly on Santa’s Naughty or Nice list you are, you may have received a whole host of Raspberry Pi and related goodies for Christmas. This may be leading you to ask a question that is as old as Raspberry Pi itself: what do I make with it? Fear not, there are a million amazing projects you can do with Raspberry Pi, and here are just some to get you started with your brand new microcomputer – or inspire you to do something else of your own!…

glowingart.co.uk Last month we looked at different forms of WS2812B LEDs (also known as NeoPixels) that you can get to make Christmas lights. Now let’s take a look at how to use them. We’re not going to dwell on the particular software too much – there are libraries available for just about every language you’re going to come across, and you can control them on Raspberry Pi, Pico, or most other platforms that you can physically access a GPIO on (we’ll use CircuitPython on Pico, but you could translate it into another language or platform fairly easily). Instead, we’re going to think about what we want them to do. In other words, we’re not going to look too much at how to make them work, we’re going to focus on…

dantonmedia.com Perhaps it is poetic justice that the world’s first largescale electronic digital computer was shrouded in secrecy. The Colossi of ancient times – the Greek word κολοσσός (kolossós) literally means ‘gigantic statue’ – are the stuff of myth and legend, whether that’s the lost Colossus of Nero or the Colossus of Rhodes destroyed by an earthquake in 226 BCE. The Colossus in this story fell foul of British national secrecy rather than natural elements. With everyone involved sworn to silence under the Official Secrets Act – revealing the computer’s existence would have been an act of treason – its key role in breaking Nazi High Command codes was kept under wraps until the 21st century. Even today, few people understand exactly what the Colossus did, how it worked, or…

Issue 149, January It was a busy month for us with new products left, right, and centre. But how well do you remember the start of the year? 1 Raspberry Pi monitor was revealed (after a long internal development time). How big is its screen? 13.3 inches 14 inches 15.6 inches 17 inches 2 A Raspberry Pi board gained wireless functionality. But which one was it? Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Pico 2 W Pico Wi-Fi Connect Pico Wow, no wires! 3 The team at Raspberry Pi got fed up with third-party hubs and decided to make their own. How many USB 3.0 ports does it feature? Just one for laughs. Three’s a magic number. Four, of course. Lucky eight. 4 Raspberry Pi released a brandnew remote access service. What’s…

rpimag.co/alientracker As fans of the Alien movies will no doubt agree, the M314 Motion Detector is a cool piece of kit. Aside from being super-useful – the Colonial Marines would certainly have struggled to detect the presence of aliens without its ultrasound capabilities – the handheld device, with its rugged military looks, was also something of a design masterpiece. Over the years, many people have replicated the prop, right down to the iconic, suspense-building, beeping sound made as it locks on to movement. Among those enthusiasts is Rob Smith, who first toyed with the idea of making such a device ten years ago. He’d stumbled across the RCWL-0516 Arduino radar module and instantly thought of Aliens. “It would just react to nearby movement,” he says. And so began a quest…

rpimag.co/3D-Print-Vice We’ve printed plenty of fun and games recently, from simple card kit aeroplanes to a propeller launcher that used planetary gears to generate enough force to launch a spinning toy high into the air. Sadly though, work gets in the way, and this month we needed an extra pair of hands to hold a PCB we were working on. So enough with the fun and games, and time for something practical: a genuinely handy little bench vice. Sure, this 3D-printed version won’t replace a heavy-duty steel one, but for simple jobs like gluing or soldering it does the trick, holding pieces firmly enough that you’ll soon wonder how you managed without it. Designed by @ms520, it’s a compact unit (80 × 90 × 40mm) with a 0–40mm clamping range.…

Raspberry Pi 1TB SSD £67 / $88 rpimag.co/ssd Raspberry Pi’s operating system and code to run additional hardware and apps all work fine from a microSD card. However, photography, multimedia, AI, and other memory- or graphics-intensive tasks will really benefit from the much more capacious storage offered by a far faster-to-access SSD. Solid-state memory has the further benefit of boot-up times “so fast it’s crazy” in the words of one happy customer. Unless you're using a Raspberry Pi 500+, you’ll need an M.2 HAT+ board to connect it. Pi Hut Advent Calendar Let It Glow £45 / $59 rpimag.co/pihutadvent If you love all things that flash and light up, the projects in the Let It Glow advent calendar are bound to appeal. Each daily surprise works with the bundled Raspberry…

twoot.space/@owlbear Zines are DIY magazines that you can make yourself, or with friends. They can be anything from a single folded page of A4, to a photocopied magazine, or an ornate hand-constructed work of papercraft art. We used Inkscape to create our zine, and it’s our preferred choice. There are a few different ways to get hold of this popular open-source vector illustration program, which tidily serves double duty as a flexible DTP program, but only the Flatpak version is currently updated to the latest version 1.4.2, which we’ve been using and has all the features and templates we need to make this task easy. Installing Inkscape We prefer to install Inkscape from the Flathub repository (rpimag.co/flathubinkscape), which provides a convenient way to install the latest stable release and keep…

smt.codes In the first two parts of this series, you got to grips with the core concepts of drawing and moving shapes of all types, sizes and colours with Pygame. Now that we know our way around Pygame, we’re going to start making things that we can play with that are a bit more interactive. This time, we’re going to make two simple programs to learn how to use our keyboard and mouse. The examples in this tutorial are a bit longer than in previous instalments, so you may want to download and follow along with the example code from GitHub repository (rpimag.co/makegamescode). For our first program, we will use the keyboard; with it, we’ll draw a red square and give it some code so it can move left and…

Name Phil Hutchinson Occupation Head of element14 Presents & Programs Community role Community organiser URL rpimag.co/element14 Among the Raspberry Pi and maker communities at large are the organised communities within them – the sum of their parts making the whole that much greater. Premier Farnell, a leading partner with Raspberry Pi, has its own community called element14, which Phil Hutchinson helps manage. “I come from a background of always being the ‘technical guy’ in every role,” Phil says. “I was the tech for a community radio station, the technician on a paintball site, technical manager of a chain of live venues. Lots of scrappy startups. Every role needed something fixing, and I am that guy.” When did you learn about Raspberry Pi? Leeds Hackspace was giving coding lessons on the…

The team was chatting the other day about terrible computers in days of yore. Of which there were many. Some of which remain decidedly rose-tinted-glasses-proof despite the passage of time. I remember the Dragon 32, which had a bug in the CPU that early models shipped with. This meant that you had to slowly load a tape with a software fix every time you started up the machine. Then there was the Philips G7000 which had a keyboard so bad that Spectrum fans laughed at it. Rob recently one-upped all of this with a tale of the ill-fated Coleco ADAM (way before his time). The ADAM was an expansion system for the ColecoVision video games console. It featured a hardware flaw that caused a strong electromagnetic pulse (EMP) when you…