Innehållsförteckning för #161 från Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

Editor Lucy Hattersley This month Lucy has been benchmarking large language models on Raspberry Pi. Makes a change from talking to herself. rpimag.co We all had to start somewhere. The initial run of just 10,000 Raspberry Pi computers was designed to boost the quality of applications to Cambridge computer science departments. It did that; and then some. Raspberry Pi creates affordable and accessible computers used by engineers and educators. There’s a direct line from learning computer science on Raspberry Pi to becoming an engineer. Raspberry Pi has come a long way. We now see students who grew up with Raspberry Pi applying for jobs with us. The circle is complete. And we’re all better off for it. Now, more than ever, it’s vital that people understand how computers work, and…

Maker Mark Olson Mark is an enterprise IT veteran and founded Flokk to bring digital record-keeping to the Canadian ranches where he grew up. flokk.ca Keeping tabs on cattle ranging over enormous ranches in rural Canada is a serious challenge. “Ranching operates outdoors, in all weather, in remote locations where there is no power or data connectivity,” explains Flokk founder and CEO Mark Olson. Record-keeping has traditionally been done using pocket notebooks, which of course are easily lost, damaged or trampled underfoot while the rancher struggles to check on each animal’s health and well-being. It’s the sort of task that hapless TV vets might have nightmares about. Nonetheless, detailed and fully up-to-date information about each cow is mandatory in the highly regulated world of animal husbandry. Computer scientist and farmer Mark…

rpimag.co/cyberplug Many people make their own cyberdecks – portable, compact devices for hacking in the post-apocalyptic wastelands – because they’re cool. We all like to customise our working environments, so why not go the whole hog and create your own computer? While we’ve seen plenty of devices built into ruggedised cases, we don’t think we’ve seen a cyberdeck that incorporated prototyping breadboards before. At least, not until now! This CyberPlug by PickentCode is a smart handheld device for hardware hackers, featuring three mini breadboards, a Raspberry Pi, a tiny Rii X1 keyboard, 5-inch monitor, and a 22.5W, 10,000mAh Baseus Adaman power bank. It’s also packing a CC1101 wireless module (that’s the antenna you can see in the picture). Other than the breadboards and the contrasting colour scheme, which tickled our fancy,…

Maker Jo Hinchliffe (AKA Concretedog) With a house and shed full of lathes, milling machines, 3D printers, and more, Jo is a constant tinkerer and is passionate about making. Obsessed with rockets and robots and much more besides, he often releases designs and projects as open source. concretedog.blogspot.com Back in issue 154 we reviewed the PicoCalc, the new Pico-centred handheld device from ClockworkPi. We’ve also had a competition to give away five of these fabulous devices to Raspberry Pi Official Magazine readers. PicoCalc ships running a version of the excellent PicoMite – we looked at getting started with that last issue (rpimag.co/159). Most of what we discussed there will work with the PicoCalc, and it’s worth checking that article out alongside this one! In this article, we are going to…

Maker Rob Miles Rob has been playing with software and hardware since almost before there was software and hardware. robmiles.com In these articles, you’ll create 3D objects from a Python program running inside the FreeCAD application. This is a great way to take your programming skills into another dimension. You can find all the sample programs in the GitHub repository: rpimag.co/pythonfreecad. Figure 1 shows a super-secret encoder made from three panels with holes in them. Individually each panel is meaningless, but stack the three together and you can read the secret message through the open holes. This would be hard to design by hand, but if you use a program to place the holes it gets a lot easier. Let’s find out how to do this. Get FreeCAD FreeCAD will…

Maker Lucy Hattersley Lucy is the editor of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine. She loves a good dataset. rpimag.co YOU’LL NEED Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi AI Camera Second computer Local network Starting an AI project often begins with building a quality dataset, which can be a complex and time-consuming task. This dataset contains the data that you want to train, test, and verify that your AI model works. This tutorial introduces a practical approach to help simplify the process. With the IMX500 sensor in Raspberry Pi AI Camera (rpimag.co/aicam), you can use your own datasets to improve your AI models. Whether you’re an experienced maker or just beginning to explore the world of edge AI, this guide will help you organise, refine, and export datasets with ease. Let’s look at how…

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! An extra cool function to an already very cool project A very neat and tidy package You too can improve your old projects whenever you like It’s been a little while for us making any Zero-based camera projects, too Lidar is a powerful tool, when you get it to work Why get social media replies on your phone when you can get them physically? A melding of two products to make something your own RP2350 projects absolutely count. An impressive emulator!…

Maker Mikey Damager Mikey is a UK-based artist, technologist, and technowomble. He builds interactive narratives, musical interfaces and AV installations from code and old bits of hardware he finds lying around. rpimag.co/ppc640deck When faced with a broken Amstrad PPC 640, Mikey Damager had two choices: to return the machine to its former glory or tear it apart and rebuild it using modern parts. He decided to do the latter, turning what was Amstrad’s first portable IBM PC compatible computer, released in 1987, into a cool-looking cyberdeck powered by Raspberry Pi 4. It produced a machine capable of running an interactive fiction project for Mikey’s master’s degree. “I wanted to explore AI and machine learning to see if I could incorporate some of the tools into a creative workflow in a way…

The official Raspberry Pi Imager tool makes installing an OS quick and simple YOU’LL NEED Raspberry Pi microSD card Raspberry Pi Imager (rpimag.co/software) To start using your Raspberry Pi computer, you’ll need an operating system installed on a microSD card (or SSD, but more on that later), which also acts as its storage. You can buy an official Raspberry Pi microSD card with the Raspberry Pi OS preloaded onto it from Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers. Otherwise, you can easily install an OS onto any microSD card (of sufficient capacity) using the Raspberry Pi Imager tool. Let’s take you through the process… 01 Get a microSD card A microSD card with 32GB or greater capacity is recommended for installing the desktop version of Raspberry Pi OS. You may well be able…

Maker Jo Hinchliffe With a house and shed full of lathes, milling machines, 3D printers and more, Jo is a constant tinkerer and is passionate about making. concretedog.blogspot.com Back in issue 157 (rpimag.co/157), we presented the Tiny Open-source Underwater Vehicle (TOUV), a palm-sized underwater explorer built with little more than some small DC motors, 3D-printed frame, and some small float tanks. It’s a super-affordable and accessible project, perfect for playing with in small pools or tanks, and a great family fun activity or small STEM project. However, its tiny stature meant that it had some shortcomings: there’s little capacity for any sort of payload on board, and it’s only really operable short range where you can maintain line of sight with it in its environment. Therefore, as the famous film quote…

Maker Dr Andrew Lewis Andrew is a specialist maker and fabricator, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. lewiswork.etsy.com If you’re old enough to remember when computer monitors were big boxes that took up an entire desk, then you might also recall that some monitors had a tiny button with ‘degauss’ printed next to it. Pressing the button would make the screen distort and produce a satisfying whomping sound from somewhere inside the box. Those monitors had a built-in degaussing coil to demagnetise the chassis and prevent distortion on the screen. Most large colour TV sets had them too, and they would fire as soon as the TV was powered on. Other monitors didn’t have a built-in degaussing coil and would have to be degaussed manually using an external…

Maker Tim Danton When not writing books about classic computers, Tim is editor-in-chief of the British technology magazine PC Pro. He has also helped to launch several technology websites, most recently TechFinitive.com, where he is a senior editor. dantonmedia.com Howard Hathaway Aiken was a remarkable man. Not merely because he was the driving force behind the world’s first genuinely useful computer, but because there were two starkly contrasting sides to his personality: on one side, the fierce, brisk and often unforgiving head of department. A man who ruled the Harvard Computational Laboratory with an iron fist. On the other, a thoughtful, loyal, entertaining friend and a loving son devoted to his mother. That sense of loyalty came to the fore in 1912, when a 12-year-old Aiken confronted his drunkard father…

magicmirror.builders Smart mirrors, aka magic mirrors, are one of those projects that every Raspberry Pi maker needs to do once. On the surface, it may seem like a complex and very advanced project; however, it’s actually fairly straightforward. The hardest part can be constructing the frame, which, if you can’t find a suitable pre-made frame at IKEA, involves a simple bit of carpentry. Some reflective two-way mirrored wrap on a big old TV and installing the Magic Mirror software are the other main steps, and the latter is very easy to configure with plenty of add-ons too. Info screens everywhere Like the idea of reusing an old screen? Raspberry Pi has a kiosk mode that allows it to boot straight to a browser – perfect for a recipe computer in…

Pico@ardu Fancy using an Arduino shield on your Raspberry Pi Pico? This project’s aim is to facilitate exactly that. Simple add a Raspberry Pi Pico, then pop the shield on top. It converts any voltages to be safe between the two as well. rpimag.co/picoardu Breadboard-2350 Billed as a ‘truly breadboard friendly’ RP2350 development board, it has 30 pins along one side instead of the usual 40 over two, with the idea being that you can use the entire length of a half-size breadboard instead of having a Pico bridge the middle. There’s extra I/O in the design, too. rpimag.co/bboard2350…

Maker Chris Forde Chris is an engineer and athlete who makes and creates in a variety of areas, mechanical, electronics, microcontrollers, software, 3D printing, and handicrafts. rpimag.co/filascale If you’re going to use a 3D printer, then you need to be sure that you have enough filament for the job. “Knowing if there is sufficient filament will tell you if you need a standby reel, a new reel, or whether the current reel will do the job,” says maker Chris Forde. One way of determining this is to weigh the filament remaining on the spool before comparing it to the weight estimate provided by your slicing software. Understanding this, Chris came up with a solution. “Normally when weighing filament, people use a separate scale and a calculator, but I thought it would…

rpimag.co/moon-and-tide-clock Want a clock that “can’t tell time but instead uses the current time to calculate the lunar phase and an incredibly specific oceanographic prediction for a tiny subset of the UK coastline?” asks PJ Dines. “Then have I got the clock for you.” After all, time is just an illusion that we’ve mapped on to the natural phenomena around us: the phases of the moon, the length of the day, the changing of the seasons: these were all here before someone decided to divide the day into 24 so-called ‘hours’, but only use numbers that only go up to 12 to describe them. One person who’s transcended time, and possibly space, PJ is the creator of the Moon and Tide Clock. Built into a repurposed brass carriage clock, this e-paper…

When you first power up your Raspberry Pi, you may (unless you set customisation options when writing the OS with Imager) be greeted by a Welcome Wizard that takes you through the initial setup process for the operating system, including locale settings, creating a user, and connecting to Wi-Fi. If you have already set these up in the Customisation section of Raspberry Pi Imager, however, you will instead be taken straight to the Raspberry Pi OS desktop. Clicking the Raspberry Pi icon brings up an applications menu with various categories Along the top of the desktop is a taskbar. At its left end are some pinned applications – Chromium web browser, File Manager, and Terminal (command-line interface) – along with tabs for any other open applications or windows. At its…

Maker Richard Smedley A tech writer, programmer, and web developer with a long history in computers, who is also into music and art. about.me/RichardSmedley Although Raspberry Pi OS will, when running the GUI desktop, automatically mount any disk-type device (USB flash key, camera, etc.) plugged into the USB port and offer to open it, you may wish to get more direct control of the process. Or, as is more often the case, you may want to mount a disk when the Raspberry Pi is running a project that doesn’t involve booting as far as the GUI, as it’s not necessary for most sensor projects, robots, etc. This tutorial has plenty of new concepts to get to grips with – but they’ll also be useful when a USB drive fails to mount,…

Maker Nicola King Nicola is a freelance writer and sub-editor. One thing she was not short of for this project was fabric – her stash of all things crafty knows no bounds! @holtonhandmade QUICK TIP Press and starch quilting fabric before you cut into it – it gives stability, control and this also aids precision. Quilt making has a history that can be traced back many hundreds of years and, as well as being items that provide much-appreciated warmth and comfort to the user, quilts often become cherished heirloom pieces with the unique handiwork, history, and love of the maker literally deeply embedded within them. Early American settlers in particular were highly skilled in quilt making, and sitting together to hand-sew their pieces became something of a social event, with stories…

Maker Lucy Hattersley Lucy talks to her Raspberry Pi all the time, so it’s about time it started talking back. rpimag.co YOU’LL NEED Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 Internet connection 4GB RAM (preferably 8GB or 16GB RAM) 8GB or more storage Large language models (LLMs) are the public face of AI. While there are linear regression models like OLS (ordinary least squares), decision trees like CART (classification and regression), and CNNs (convolutional neural networks) like MobileNet, few people outside of AI have heard of such technologies. Everybody has heard of the large language model GPT (generative pre-trained transformer), in particular the chat application built on top of it: ChatGPT. So welcome to the public face of AI. In this tutorial, we are going to explore running large language models on…

Earlier in this issue, we showed you how to get started with your Raspberry Pi. You may now be wanting to put it to work in your house – after all, it’s a powerful machine with many applications. While there are definitely some fun ways to make use of Raspberry Pi that we love (check out retropie.org.uk for all your retro gaming needs), we wanted to highlight some more practical ways to use your new microcomputer (or microcontroller). Want more ideas? Check out our Christmas Projects guide in the previous issue: rpimag.co/160…

Elecrow rpimag.co/picow5 £5 / $7 SPECS DIMENSIONS: 51mm × 21mm, same as Raspberry Pi Pico CONNECTIVITY: USB Type-C, wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/n 2.4GHz/5GHz, Bluetooth, 40-pin GPIO STORAGE: 8MB flash Verdict A great alternative to your standard Raspberry Pico 2 W at the same price point, but you can’t quite slip it into every Pico-specific use-case – just most of them. 9/10 In order to ensure maximum compatibility with Raspberry Pi Pico use-cases, Pico 2 and the rest of its line was shipped with a USB Micro B port for connectivity and power. As the chip that powers Pico 2, RP2350, is available for anyone to use as they see fit, one of the most common alternatives we see for Pico 2 is a board with USB-C for power and data. Elecrow has…

We live in an era where we can do a lot from home in terms of both work and play, along with wireless devices that can make use of convenient home networking too. Raspberry Pi can make your home network just that much better – we use it a lot ourselves – and here are just some ways to do that. 01. Smart doorbell Who’s there? rpimag.co/rpidoorbell Not only does this replace your off-the-shelf smart doorbell with cheaper and more customisable hardware, you can also use it like an intercom. Take that, Nest. 02. Raspberry Pi router Manage your network rpimag.co/rpirouter The router from your ISP can be hit or miss, but with Raspberry Pi you can make your own router with all the custom settings you might be missing out…

Aliens! I’ve been struggling to get my head wrapped around the DreamHAT+ Radar board. I remember reading your review, and thought it sounded promising, and I’ve had emails from various online hardware purveyors telling me to buy one, but not really thought what I could do with one that would justify the purchase price. Rob Smith’s Aliens tracker changed that. Flippin’ heck, that’s a quality bit of kit! The ability to find aliens crawling around in your walls is a godsend all year round, not just at Halloween. I feel like I did when I first realised you could get GPS modules for Raspberry Pi: this is proper technology that should be reserved for grown-ups, but somehow is now available for me to play with. What a world! Only one…

I’ve probably thought this at the beginning of every year for the past 15 or so but… 2026 truly does sound like a random future year that a 1970s science-fiction writer would use, doesn’t it? Aliens, spaceships, moon bases, perfectly balanced meals in pill form, these are the kinds of things we should have now. Although we do have ridiculously powerful pocket computers, electric cars, watch phones, and tiny computers you can pop in other things to power them up. See, I was able to shoehorn Raspberry Pi in there somehow. It really has just become a normal part of (my) life to make something smart with a Raspberry Pi It really has just become a normal part of (my) life to make something smart with a Raspberry Pi. Not just…