Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #163

Lucy has just been wassailing in the park and at least the trees appreciate her singing voice. rpimag.co It's a big month for us at Raspberry Pi Official Magazine. This issue, we dig right into our roots as a community magazine that helps the next generation develop coding skills (and hopefully improve ours on the way). Python is our language of choice. Sean McManus has given us his Quick Intro to Python. It's a great feature that gets you up and running with practical hacks for our favourite programming language. Sean will take you from Hello World, to lists, functions, and objects, up to creating simple programs that craft art, create QR codes, and control turtle robots. You even get to edit PDFs from Python. There's a lot of fun…

Raspberry Pi has released another new product for 2026, the humble (yet powerful) Flash Drive. Available in 128GB and 256GB variants, the brand new USB 3.0, USB-A device starts at $30. Helen Lynn, Director of Communications at Raspberry Pi says: “For basics like these, it's tempting to reach for the cheapest thing on Amazon or whatever you find in your local supermarket, but you can easily end up with a device that has sluggish read and write speeds, fragile casing, or – worst of all – far less storage capacity than it claims.” Raspberry Pi has brought its usual exacting engineering standards to the new accessory, so you can be sure that this is a quality piece of kit. Sustained performance Raspberry Pi's Flash Drive can sustain a write speed…

In June 2025 Raspberry Pi launched its second ever hacking challenge (rpimag.co/hackchallenge2). The challenge is to see if side-channel attacks can be implemented against the powerhardened Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that underpins RP2350's secure boot (rpimag.co/rp2350). So far, the answer seems to be: “no”. So Raspberry Pi has extended the deadline and removed one of the key requirements. Stack smasher Thomas Roth is a co-CEO of Hextree and host of YouTube's stacksmashing, writing for Raspberry Pi's blog, says: “So far, we don't have a winner, so we decided to evolve the challenge by removing one of the core defence-in-depth features: the randomisation of memory accesses. “Our AES implementation was designed to withstand side-channel attacks by using multi-way secret sharing,” writes Roth, “where sensitive values are split into random components that…

Raspberry Pi has announced more memory-driven price increases to its range of single-board computers. Writing on the Raspberry Pi blog, Eben Upton, CEO and Co-Founder of Raspberry Pi blamed the rises on the continued rise in the cost of LPDDR4. These price rises were driven by “an unprecedented rise in the cost of LPDDR4 memory, thanks to competition for memory fab capacity from the AI infrastructure roll-out.” In December 2025, Raspberry Pi introduced a new, low-cost, Raspberry Pi 5 with just 1GB of RAM. Priced at $45, the new model was designed to offset the “unprecedented rise in the cost of LPDDR4 memory”. The price of the entry-level Raspberry Pi 1GB remains unchanged. The current situation is ultimately a temporary one, and we look forward to unwinding these price increases…

Our friends over at Sixfab, one of our long-standing Raspberry Pi Design Partners, are kicking off 2026 in serious style. The company headed to Las Vegas in January 2026 to pick up the CES Best of Innovation Award (rpimag.co/cesaward). CES's Best of Innovation is the show's highest honour. Sixfab won for its new AI gateway: ALPON X5 AI (rpimag.co/alponx5). The device is powered by Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 and features DEEPX's DX-M1 accelerator chip. If you've ever needed to connect your Raspberry Pi to… well, just about anything, you've probably come across Sixfab's gear. It has been making clever connectivity solutions for years: LTE and 5G modems, IoT shields, and the sort of industrial-ready bits and pieces that keep real-world deployments ticking without anyone having to duct-tape a USB…

Maker Osmund is a Norwegian technologist who works professionally with software and system architecture. He spends his free time building playful hardware projects that combine AI, electronics, and humour. rpimag.co/aiduckgit Some of the best ideas in life can feel rather ‘quackers’, and that's certainly the case with Osmund Grov's project. He's built an AI assistant housed in an old duck alarm clock and, when words are uttered, the plastic waterfowl's mouth moves – producing something a tad “terrifying”, Redditors joked after Osmund shared his work on the discussion platform. “I was inspired by a couple of fairly boring home assistants from Amazon and Google,” Osmund explains. “I wanted something with a bit more personality and briefly considered 3D-printing a custom enclosure. Then I remembered an annoying duck alarm clock I'd…