Table of contents for #164 in Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

Editor Lucy is editor of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine and loves nerdy environments. Honestly, CamJam even had a train set. rpimag.co This month I visited the fantastic CamJam (camjam.me) event in Cambridge, which is still going strong after 14 years thanks to the efforts of Michael, Tim, and Brian. It was fantastic to reconnect with the maker community that gave Raspberry Pi its start in life. Philip Colligan from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Eben Upton from Raspberry Pi Ltd both gave great speeches on the future of technology and education. Philip has written a paper called Why kids still need to learn to code in the age of AI (rpimag.co/kidscodeai). I'd encourage you to read it. AI presents a challenge. We've got a rapidly changing technological environment and the…

Maker Daveed is a retired tour guide and somewhat reticent IT project manager. He's also solo parent to a six-year-old and owner of a janky (in a good way) VW camper-van. rpimag.co/5tbmedia For some years, Daveed Walzer had what he felt to be the perfect portable media server: a 2TB WD My Passport Wireless Pro. Having purchased it in 2017, he loved that it would wirelessly stream media to devices via a Plex server while working remotely in the French Alps and bouncing between ski stations. “It was a tiny, grab-and-go, offline media server large enough to hold my entire media library,” he recalls. “I used that thing in hotels, Airbnbs, friends’ places, flights, tents, and more. I could connect to its hotspot and watch on my tablet or most…

rpimag.co/FANUC-terminal We're used to seeing 3D-printed enclosures for computing on the go, but in this project Arran Gunn has come up with something slightly different: a stainless steel case. “I'm a metalworker and CAD designer”, Arran says, “and I wanted a stainless steel case for my Raspberry Pi projects, so I've made multiple prototypes to make it possible without disturbing RF or losing range … I've been using the steel cases for over a year on different projects and I haven't run into any problems that can't be circumvented.” The Cyberbrick, as Arran is delightfully calling it, is comprised of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a PiSugar uninterruptible power supply, and a Pimoroni Inventor HAT Mini, with the adorable tiny keyboard coming from an M5Stack Cardputer. Arran has also…

Maker Lucy wishes you could remember things as well as htop. rpimag.co This month we have been playing around with the new Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM. While the RAM shortage caused by the demands of AI infrastructure is annoying beyond belief, this has been a great chance for us to really get to grips with RAM. Generating images in Stable Diffusion on a Raspberry Pi with 1GB gave us a good chance to fully explore the RAM setup in Raspberry Pi OS. And we thought we'd share some of our learnings here. Check out your RAM There are a few tools you can use to check out the RAM on your Raspberry Pi. Chief amongst these is the one called ‘free’. Boot up your Raspberry Pi and open a…

Maker Rob has been playing with software and hardware since almost before there was software and hardware. robmiles.com In this episode, we are going to delve into the inner workings of FreeCAD and also make some nice luggage tags. We will discover how to create curved lines and use them to add elements to the faces of objects we want to extrude, including character designs. You can find all the sample programs here: rpimag.co/pythonfreecad. Figure 1 shows luggage tags that were produced by the program we will be creating. The text elements are generated from TrueType fonts. Let's see how we can make them. Going straight Up until now, all the objects that we have created have been made up of straight lines. Our luggage tag needs a curved edge…

Maker 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 Click-click-click. This was the inauspicious, mundane sound that marked the true beginnings of storedprogram computing, as a thin thread of tape wound its way through a reader on 6 May 1949. Two minutes and 35 seconds later, the teleprinter spluttered into action, producing a table of squares from zero to 99. And it all happened in Cambridge, England, 3500 miles and an ocean away from Philadelphia where the EDVAC was still being assembled. By all rights, the EDVAC should have been the first storedprogram computer. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the ENIAC's main…

Maker K.G. wasn't an Amiga kid, but always had a soft spot for mod trackers and night-long games of Scorched Tanks on a friend's A4000T. rpimag.co/owlbear We'll be using Blitter Studios’ Amiberry, a fork of the WinUAE emulator This month we're going to emulate the Commodore Amiga. This classic 16/32-bit home computer of the 1980s and ’90s is still widely and enthusiastically supported, through original hardware, new hardware and FGPA clones, and emulation. We'll be using Blitter Studios’ Amiberry (amiberry.com), a fork of the WinUAE emulator, optimised for Raspberry Pi's aarch64 architecture, although it'll also run on x86 and amd64, and the Mac version supports Apple Silicon aarch64. Install Amiberry To make it easy to keep updated to the latest version, we're going to install a flatpak of Amiberry. If…

Pimoroni | £35 / $38 | pimoroni.com With myriad connections and extra features, this versatile board makes it easier for beginners to get started with coding and electronics. It's powered by a standard Pico 2 W (with built-in wireless connectivity) soldered to the top of the board, surrounded by ports, pins, NeoPixels, and buttons - in an identical layout to that of the excellent Inventor 2040 W it supersedes. For robotics, there are headers for up to six servos, along with an on-board motor driver connected to two JST-SH ports; with six pins, the latter are for encoderequipped motors, but you can still wire standard ones up to a four-pin connector. In addition, there are six GPIO headers (including three analogue inputs), two Qwiic/STEMMA QT ports (for sensors), an I2C…

Cytrence rpimag.co/kiwiplus £89/$119 SPECS I/O USB-C (host connection), USB-C (input connection), USB-A (shared connection), HDMI, 6× GPIO CONNECTIVITY 1080p video, human input devices, virtual serial connection, UART, ATX, USB devices DIMENSIONS 46 × 46 × 15mm Verdict The Kiwi KVM with some nice upgrades that can really streamline development, with a fairly reasonable price point. 9/10 Kiwi's KVM is not a regular KVM, in that you're not just sharing a keyboard, video, and mouse between two systems. It also allows you to capture the video from your other computer and display it on a host PC, complete with the ability to send mouse and keyboard commands back to the target. Like a local remote VNC, but with slightly better response times. We were surprised how well the original version worked,…

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!…

Magic The glowing orb/magic sphere in issue 164 is brilliant! Quite literally, as it glows! I've used potentiometers before, for gain and volume controls in analogue circuits, and I've just about got my head around using a potentiometer with an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) to take the varying resistance of a potentiometer and turn it into a digital signal that MicroPython can make sense of. But I've never used a potentiometer as the axis of a moving part, and taken the position of that potentiometer to control the brightness of a glowing orb. Hats off to whoever made that; it must have been a real eureka moment when they realised that they could do it. William, via email It's very clever, isn't it? What's almost as impressive as the original idea…

I had a bit of a shock this month. It was my own fault really: after talking to Toby Roberts, Raspberry Pi's inhouse maker of awesome things, about his BBC Micro tribute, I thought I'd install an emulator on my Raspberry Pi 500+ and enjoy some retro computing. Not a BBC Micro - although I can remember using one at school, I didn't get deep enough into programming to have any sort of nostalgia for that machine. No, I wanted to recreate another old system - the Sega Mega Drive, courtesy of the Sega Genesis Collection of legal ROMs available via Steam. There's something about pretending to be a superfast blue hedgehog that brings a nostalgic tear to my eye, so why not install RetroPie and see if after all…

Maker Pawel is CTO of Raspberry Pi design partner RapidLab, based in Poland and a keen maker of Picobased projects. rpimag.co/lightclock Isn't the change of seasons welcome? The birds are nesting, spring flowers are brightening up gardens, and trees beginning to bud. It's been a long winter for many reasons, made all the tougher for being so endlessly dark, cold and windy. No wonder some of us were keen to hibernate! Maker Pawel Skiba got an unexpected mid-winter wake-up call that prompted him to create a Pico-based Light Alarm Clock to make the transition to morning that little bit less of a jolt. Sound the alarm Pawel speaks for many of us when he bemoans the endless winter nights. “It's dark when we come back home after work and it's…

rpimag.co/ISS-sewage-indicator The open internet has been a gift for citizen scientists. Websites collate tons of data for the eager amateur to sift through. So, with a data Swiss Army knife such as Python, or a more dedicated data analytics tool like R, anyone can track traffic jams to work out the most efficient time to set off for home, or keep an eye on pollution levels in our precious streams and rivers. You can track crime rates, and overlay the data on maps to give you an at-a-glance view of where the villains are. Alternatively, you could do something more frivolous instead. Something like this. Maker Seafoxc has looked at the data coming out of the International Space Station, the crowning glory of co-operation and science, and somehow decided that…

Maker Lucy is in the pub with her “space horses”, much to the amusement of all. rpimag.co Image generation is a powerful demonstration of what is possible on a Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM. Using OnnxStream, we can create images by streaming the weights from a Stable Diffusion model into our Raspberry Pi 5's four-core CPU. This is great fun and puts heavy demands on our powerful CPU while keeping the RAM usage light. We should note that image generation is one of the more fascinating and controversial aspects of AI. Models such as Stable Diffusion are trained on several billion images. Image generation is one of the more fascinating and controversial aspects of AI Diffusers are one of the most modern image generation techniques. They are trained by adding…

Maker Nicola is a freelance writer and sub-editor. In this issue, she's making some home decor that tells her the local weather, eats up some of her fabric stash, and provides a comfy headrest. Three wins! @holtonhandmade This month's craft/tech mash-up concentrates on making something that will hopefully prove useful when you want to know what the weather is up to. The older this author gets, the more she is becoming preoccupied with the weather and, given recent downpours in this neck of the woods, when the rain will finally be stopping. (Living in the UK, you'd think she'd just be used to it!) We'll be sewing a stuffed cloud (other appropriate shapes might be a rainbow, lightning symbol, a huge rain drop, or a sun - we'll leave that…

Maker A tech writer, programmer, and web developer with a long history in computers, who is also in music and art. about.me/RichardSmedley It's great that Raspberry Pi is so portable, but sometimes you may want to use it without taking it with you. Here, Raspberry Pi OS is a real strength, as Unix-like operating systems have been used this way for over 50 years. Over time, as the internet has given the opportunity for malicious users to connect to computers, old standards like Telnet and rlogin have been replaced by Secure Shell (SSH), based on public-key cryptography. Once set up, secure connections are simple, and open to scripted, automatic connection for your projects. As a reminder, please set a secure password on your Raspberry Pi before accessing SSH. Try connecting…

Raspberry Pi's RP2350 microcontroller chip is the brains of Raspberry Pi Pico 2, along with a host of third-party boards. It's been a while since we looked at some of these RP2350-based devices, back in issue 148 (rpimag.co/148), and many more have appeared since, so we reckon it's a good time to revisit the topic. The RP2350 features dual Arm Cortex-M33 processors running at 150MHz, 520KB of on-chip SRAM, and twelve PIO state machines. So, compared with the RP2040 microcontroller from the original Pico, it offers a major performance boost for handling more complex computational tasks. No wonder it's been used in such a wide range of third-party boards and devices - you can check out the full product catalogue at rpimag.co/rp2350catalogue. We'll be taking a look at a few…

Waveshare / The Pi Hut | £23 / $31 | waveshare.com / thepihut.com Verdict A very slick RP2350-based touch display with a builtin IMU. Most Pico-style boards lack any form of display, although you can buy add-ons to enable video output. Waveshare, however, produces a range of RP2350-based A H devices with a built-in display in various shapes and sizes. This particular model is circular and comes with an optional metal case with cutouts for the boot and reset buttons, USB-C port, microSD card slot (for extra storage), I2C and UART four-pin headers, and GPIO breakouts on the rear. With a 466 × 466 pixel resolution, the colour AMOLED screen looks vibrant and has capacitive touch. Combined with the built-in six-axis IMU and an RTC with battery header, this could…

Maker Maker-in-chief at Pi Towers, Toby has most recently been playing with AI running locally on Raspberry Pi. @tobyrobertspi Back when this writer was at school, before everyone carried a supercomputer in their pockets, computers were kept away from us children. The Acorn Archimedes, and before that, the BBC Micro, were stored in the smoky, coffee-drenched fog of the teachers’ staffroom, which is why, I naturally assumed at the time, it acquired its beige, nicotine-hued tan. We'd play a text-based game called Granny's Garden for an hour once a fortnight, and somehow that was deemed enough to prepare us for the brave new world of digital technology that was hurtling towards us. It is therefore hard for this writer to get misty-eyed about the BBC Micro, but it does have…

Maker A senior high school student who loves using Raspberry Pi to make interesting contraptions, and is currently into machine learning projects. rpimag.co/garagerobotics Machine learning has obviously come a long way recently. Several years ago, a maker creating a working Pokédex (a digital compendium of monsters identified by sight) using computer vision spent a lot of time getting it to recognise only a small number of creatures from the famous game series. Now, makers like Connor are creating cameras that not only quickly create neural networks capable of object identification, but can also be used to test it. “The project uses a Raspberry Pi, an AI accelerator, a battery backup, a 3.5-inch touch LCD display, and a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 to create an all-in-one means to assist in…

rpimag.co/Etch-a-sketch-dock The humble Etch A Sketch, with its knobs that turn to trace a line on a screen in the X and Y axes, is ripe for computerisation. Nikodem Bartnik certainly thought so, as he set out to turn his into a CNC machine. Nikodem's robot was originally going to attach to the Etch A Sketch, but after the first prototype he realised that this would make it unfeasibly heavy. As the way to erase the Etch A Sketch's screen is to pick it up and shake it, this wouldn't do. So instead he settled on a docking station design, which he modelled in Fusion 360 – the build comprises just three 3D printed parts for the frame, plus the gears that go over the Etch A Sketch's buttons, two…

With the same powerful BCM2712 system on chip (SoC) as the other Raspberry Pi 5 computers, the new 1GB variant offers a more affordable entry point for users who need extra processing grunt and/or features such as the Raspberry Pi connector for PCIe to add an NVMe SSD or AI HAT+. To this end, we've rounded up a range of project ideas that make good use of the 1GB model's performance, but don't require a large amount of RAM. We follow that up with a handy guide on how to run the 1GB model in headless mode and keep an eye on memory usage, then a tutorial on running the Stable Diffusion deep learning model on it to create images from text prompts. We've rounded up a range of project…

Maker An artist and maker with 30+ years of experience. Maker of novelty items, writer, and former research scientist. lewis-workshop.com Wire-wrapped circuits were once the gold standard for prototyping, although it's uncommon to see them in the wild these days. You could go to any electronics supplier and buy special versions of sockets and connectors with wirewrap posts on them. Wire wrapping is pretty simple, but it's also an incredibly powerful process that helped shape the technology landscape of the 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s. DuPont wires are not the only way You take a protoboard with pre-drilled holes in it, add your components through the board, either directly or by placing them into inline sockets. Then you would twist wire around the protruding lugs on the reverse of…

Maker Rob has been playing with software and hardware since almost before there was software and hardware. robmiles.com Cyanotype printing provides a cheap, easy way to make images from photographic negatives. In this article, we'll see how to make good-looking prints using a 3D printed frame. Figure 1 shows a variety of pictures printed using the cyanotype process. They were created by putting a photographic negative on top of light-sensitive paper and leaving it in sunlight for a while. The images were taken on black and white film in two sizes: 120 roll film and 5 × 4in large format sheets. Cyanotype paper turns deep blue when exposed to light, which means that when used in conjunction with a negative, you end up with a positive image on the paper.…

Maker A long-time Raspberry Pi user andtinkerer, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. philkingeditor.com YOU'LL NEED 1× solderless breadboard 1× RGB LED 3× 100Ω resistors 4× pin-to-socket jumper wires We lit up a standard LED in part 2 (issue 159), using the LED class. GPIO Zero also offers an RGBLED class for controlling - guess what - an RGB LED! In this chapter, we'll make use of this to light up our LED in different shades by altering the red, green, and blue values. Then we'll code up a little program that tracks the Raspberry Pi's CPU usage percentage and adjusts the LED between green and red accordingly to show how much processing power it's using. Select your RGB LED Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are…

Pimoroni | £17 / $18 | pimoroni.com Verdict An easy and fun way to control a string of addressable LEDs. We reviewed the original Plasma 2350 back in issue 146 and now there's a version with built-in wireless connectivity, which opens up extra possibilities for controlling a connected strip of WS28l2/NeoPixel or APA102/ DotStar RGB LEDs - the optional starter kit includes a 10m string of 66 frosted LED stars. It's dead easy to get started. Just connect your LED string's three or four wires to the board's screw terminals, then use its USB-C port to access the MicroPython firmware, library, and numerous code examples on a computer. Impressive effects include falling snowflakes, alternating/random blinkies, sparkles, fire, pulsing, and a sweeping rainbow. More can be found via some community resources,…

Pimoroni rpimag.co/badgeware From £50/$55 SPECS DISPLAY: 2.7-inch, 264 × 176 e-paper (Badger); 2.8inch, 320 × 240 colour IPS LCD (Tufty); 39 × 26 (minus islands) white LED matrix (Blinky) FEATURES: RP2350A microcontroller, 16MB QSPI flash storage, 8MB PSRAM, 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth, 5× user buttons, Home/Boot and Reset/Sleep buttons, polycarbonate case with LED lighting POWER: 1000mAh LiPo, rechargeable via USB-C port DIMENSIONS: 84 × 76 × 20mm Pimoroni's new range of RP2350based Badgeware wearable devices (lanyard included) offer a major upgrade over the originals. There are three models to choose from: the Badger (with e-paper screen), Tufty (colour LCD), and Blinlcy (LED matrix). The first two follow on from their namesake RP2040powered predecessors, while the Blinlcy is an interesting addition to the line. One of the first things you'll…

We love it when folks are creative with a Raspberry Pi. While there are definitely many Raspberry Pi devices out there plugged into factories and industry doing important jobs, it's nice to see when people do something artistic - or just plain funny - with a Raspberry Pi. A great example of that is some of the ways people have taken the ancient concept of telling the time, and given it a twist. Here are just some of our favourites. 01. Counter-rotating clock Shifted perspective rpimag.co/rotatingclock The project that sparked the idea for this list, where the hour hand remains stationary but the entire face rotates instead. Editor Lucy does not enjoy it. 02. Falling clock Manufactured error rpimag.co/fallingclock When Burke McCabe decided to fix his clock, which apparently made…

Many Raspberry Jams and maker events love to celebrate the birthday of Raspberry Pi - which is technically 29 February but when your birthday is a leap day, you get to choose a nearby day anyway. One of the oldest Raspberry Jams is CamJam, and they had a special birthday event at Makespace Cambridge where folks were showing off their projects, chatting Raspberry Pi, and there was even a talk by Eben himself. Here's to many more years of Raspberry Pi. Crowdfund this Crowdfunding campaigns to keep an eye on Open Stack This is an I0T HAT for Raspberry Pi that can also run on its own once disconnected from Raspberry Pi. It supports 4G, GNSS satellite connection, and Bluetooth without needing to be connected to Raspberry Pi either, making…