The MagPi

This month, for those who celebrate, is the Cambridge Beer Festival. The team at Raspberry Pi are all excited and ready to impart their craft-based brewing wisdom. Beer making may be an age-old art, but that doesn't mean it can't be brought into the modern age with a little Raspberry Pi smarts (page 32). We get that not everybody drinks, let alone wants to brew their own beer, so our second feature this month is Master Linux & Command Line (page 60). Learning the command line changes how you use computers forever, and I really can't recommend it enough for all technology enthusiasts. There are some amazing tutorials this month. Sean McManus has created Bedtime Stories (page 40) that uses ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion to create surreal dreamlike stories. Stewart…

Will and India work at multidisciplinary design agency Kakapo Labs, which Will set up as “an incubator for exploring new ideas.” magpi.cc/chatgptgumball MAKER A regular fixture in the security software PR calendar is the annual survey that finds 70-plus percent of people quizzed by complete strangers at a train station are more than happy to hand over their essential passwords and memorable information in return for nothing more than a winning smile and perhaps a bar of chocolate. Despite these alarmist news items gaining media coverage every single year for more than a decade, we punters just don't seem to wise up to such confidence tricks. Tech entrepreneurs Kakapo Labs set about a more benign riff, on the idea that Joe Public loves a bit of flattery, using clever verbal…

01 A second-hand confectionery dispenser was retrofitted with a new gearing system, stepper motor, and easy stepper motor board. Aligning the dispensing mechanism was a challenge! 02 A voltage converter allows everything to run from a 5 V power input. Raspberry Pi Pico W is attached via USB and runs MicroPython and Thonny IDE with data via Amazon Web Services. Messages are shown on an Adafruit I2C LED matrix. 03 ChatGPT is used to communicate with users via WhatsApp and Twilio, and judge whether the conversationalist is worthy of a chocolate-based reward.…

Richard is a software engineer and hobbyist designer with a passion for astronomy, vintage electronics, and unusual form factor computers. magpi.cc/pifindergit MAKER When stargazing, amateur astronomers need to know what their telescope is looking at in the vast darkness of space, yet this is easier said than done. “Finding very small and dim objects in the night sky can be challenging, historically requiring paper charts and a good working knowledge of the constellations,” Richard Sutherland explains. There are, however, newer ways to determine a telescope's position and find objects. “There are computerised pointing systems that rely on rotary encoders mounted securely to a telescope mount,” Richard continues. “They monitor a telescope's movement and extrapolate where it is pointing from this information, but they can be difficult to add to a…

A retired software developer, living in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada with his wife, who appreciates having the time to make whatever the heck he damn well feels like! magpi.cc/mgardiyt MAKER Michael Gardi's reproductions of classic computers have featured in The MagPi‘s pages on several occasions. A proud Canadian, he enjoys spotlighting “Canada's contributions to the personal computer revolution.” Confident that he “had a pretty good handle on all of the machines available in the 1960s and 1970s”, he was somewhat flabbergasted when he came across the MCM/70, a “beautiful and innovative” Canadian-built personal computer that he'd never heard of. Even more so because it was conceived and made in Kingston, Ontario, very near to where Michael lives. Hardware challenges Keen to build his own repro version, Michael began to source components.…

17-year-old Fady is a “tech enthusiast, programmer and perfectionist” whose love for computing began when he learned Java at school. magpi.cc/vendingmachinegit MAKER If you can think of it, “you can probably do it on a Raspberry Pi,” believes 17-year-old Fady Faheem, who saw a broken vending machine for sale online and decided to give it a tech upgrade. Fady wanted to use his tech chops to benefit his community in Fort Worth, Texas, and the refurbished vending machine seemed an ideal gift to his local church – “the best place I knew” – which could do some micro fundraising too. The project has kick-started his career: “If I didn't do this, I wouldn't be where I am today, working as a software engineer at 17.” Feeling blessed Task one was…