Tabla de contenidos para #159 en Raspberry Pi Official Magazine

Editor Lucy Hattersley Andy Bryant just dropped a huge box of chocolate bars on the team and Lucy's main to-do this month is to go for more runs. rpimag.co Raspberry Pi started out with just 10,000 boards and an aim to encourage computer science take-up amongst students. Starting from humble beginnings, the little computer become a true British success story. Raspberry Pi now has a whole range of devices to choose from: there's a board for everyone. Choosing the right Raspberry Pi for your project can feel like being a kid in a sweet shop. This month, Ben's Christmas lights project is based around Raspberry Pi Pico, while KG's x86_64 emulation build uses Raspberry Pi 5. If you want to get started with GPIO, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 WH…

Maker Andrew Menadue Works with embedded firmware by day and resurrects and recreates vintage calculators and computers for fun. rpimag.co/menadue When most people think of Casio, calculators and watches usually spring to mind. But, over nearly 80 years, this Japanese electronics company has developed many other devices including computers such as the Casio FX9000P. Powered by a Z80 processor and coming with built-in BASIC, the FX90009P is highly sought after, despite fetching high prices at auction. Many surviving units, however, require careful restoration. This didn't deter Andrew Menadue. “Being a big Casio fan, I decided to buy one, partly to see what it was like and partly to add to my collection,” he says. “I knew from the auction photos that vertical lines were appearing on the screen, but I was fairly…

rpimag.co/ShippingMonitor Otis Redding may have sat on the dock of the bay, watching the ships go rolling in and rolling out again, but history doesn't record whether we ever wondered what the ships were called, or where they came from. Unlike Reddit user Embarrassed Octopus, who was curious about the glimpses of the ships on the Mersey that they get from out the window of their home. The display comprises a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a Pimoroni Inky Impression 7.3-inch display, and a Wegmatt dAISy Mini AIS receiver. AIS stands for ‘Automatic Identification System’, and it's this device that picks up the signals coming from the ships themselves, which goes to the display via the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. There's probably a website somewhere that displays the location of…

Maker Nicola King Nicola is a freelance writer and sub-editor. This month she's appreciating autumn, as all fibre fans do, and is surrounded by yarn… she's knitting, crocheting, and sculpting it! @holtonhandmade QUICK TIP For a good reference point, sketch or photograph some birds in your garden to get an idea of shape, size and colour. Needle felting, or forming some kind of shape from natural wool fibres, is a highly addictive hobby. It's something this author has done before, and in this latest handicraft/Raspberry Pi mash-up, she's returning to needle-felting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we'll see how easy, therapeutic, and inexpensive a pastime it is and secondly, we'll suggest how you can utilise a Raspberry Pi RP2040-powered microcontroller board to bring your felted item – in this…

Maker Phil King A long-time Raspberry Pi user and tinkerer, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. philkingeditor.com YOU'LL NEED: 1× solderless breadboard 3× LEDs (one each of red, yellow, and green) 3× 330Ω resistors 4× pin-to-socket jumper wires One of the first physical computing projects you'll want to try with GPIO Zero is lighting an LED. This is very simple with the library's LED class and uses few lines of code. Here we'll show you how to wire up a simple circuit connected to your Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins, then light an LED and make it blink on and off. We'll then add two more LEDs to make a traffic light system. Connect an LED Before building a circuit, you must shut down your…

Author 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 To understand how the Complex Number Calculator1 came into being, you need to understand the role of Bell Labs in 1930s America. And to understand that, you need to jump in a time machine and travel back to 1909 San Francisco. This was three years after the earthquake that had destroyed swathes of the city. Three men looked on: Frank Jewett, John Carty, and Theodore Vail. Writer Jon Gertner vividly describes Jewett as “a slight, balding, cigar-smoking physicist” in his celebratory book about Bell Labs called The Idea Factory.2 Jewett had…

New font For the last ten years, Raspberry Pi OS has used the Piboto font, a version of the Roboto font created for Android 4.0 that was released in 2011; Piboto itself is a custom version created by Simon before Google updated it. From Trixie, the system font will be Nunito Sans Light – you'd have to be really studying the fonts to notice the difference, though. “It was time for a change,” explains Simon on why. “It was recommended by the icon designer… and we decided it looked good”. Both are sans serif typefaces; however, Nunito Sans uses square dots over i and j, and is very slightly wider. New icons Many icons around the desktop have been updated, which should be a lot easier to notice for most…

Sunfounder rpimag.co/pironman5mini £34 / $46 SPECS FEATURES: HAT+ with M.2 SSD slot, RGB fan, PWM active cooler, power button, RTC battery DIMENSIONS: 67.8 × 98.6 × 101.5mm Verdict While not quite as eye-catching or featurepacked as its siblings, it's a quality case with effective cooling. 8/10 We reviewed the original Pironman 5 tower PC-style case for Raspberry Pi 5 back in issue 145 and were very impressed by its looks and cooling performance. Since then, it has been joined by a Max version with room for two NVMe SSDs, and now the Pironman 5 Mini. As the name suggests, this is a more compact case – with a volume of 0.68 litres vs its siblings’ 1.03 litres. This, along with a lower price point, has resulted in several compromises such as…

Spooky season builds I laughed when I looked in the magazine and saw not one, but two Halloween prop builds [the other being the Bog Body – actually a theatre prop, but in the spirit of the season we'll allow it]. We've only just had summer – let us enjoy it! That was my first thought, anyway. Now that there are only a couple more weekends before Halloween to make something to entertain my kids, I appreciate you jumping the gun. I've got a cheap skeleton (not the one your writer used, but something that will jump and move), a reused stepper motor, reused PIR sensor, and a battery pack that I wasn't using anyway. I just have to hope one of my pumpkins grows big enough to use as…

This month, amid the usual cacophony sparked by artificial intelligence, some clarity cut through the noise from an unexpected source. The actor Matthew McConaughey, he of The Wolf Of Wall Street, A Time To Kill, Interstellar and points between, put forward a positive vision for AI that I'd not heard before. McConaughey reckons that he'd like a private large language model, or as he puts it, a version of ChatGPT that's trained only on things that he's written himself. Instead of harnessing the internet at large, with its variety of sources ranging in quality from the unimpeachable to the ludicrous, he'd prefer a way of referring to his own thoughts, with a little bit of intelligence to link ideas together. There'd be no more mistakes like getting the number of Rs…

Maker Ulderico Arcidiaco Ulde is the co-founder, CEO, and chief hardware engineer at Italy's Sfera Labs. sferalabs.cc In 1962, The Baltic, a 26 metre-long Norwegian tug, took to the oceans. Unlike today, boats of the 1960s were largely manually controlled. Little wonder because the most widely used computer was IBM's 1401: it had a 16,000-character core memory and weighed several hundred kilos. The 1401 was so expensive that most companies would generally rent one. The 1401 computer took 17 seconds just to boot up and lacked both software and interfaces needed to work in industrial, let alone marine, scenarios. Other early computers such as the renowned DEC PDP-1 would have been no more suitable or affordable to control a commercial craft. Yet by the time The Baltic tug had been in…

rpimag.co/HSPropellerLauncher Propeller launchers have been around for generations: simple handheld toys that send a small rotor spinning into the air. Traditionally made from wood or bamboo, and more recently plastic, they've also gone by names like helicopter spinners, prop toys, or just plain propeller launchers. Today, you'll find endless versions on 3D model sites for printing at home, but a new wave of more elaborate, engineered designs has started to appear. And while we've always had a soft spot for over-engineering, this one really takes it to the extreme. Lukas Hannert has designed a three-stage herringbone planetary gearbox with a 1:64 gear ratio. What on earth does that mean? Well, the planetary system gives compact, efficient load sharing across multiple planet gears, while the herringbone tooth form cancels axial thrust…

Maker Dr Andrew Lewis Andrew is a specialist maker and fabricator, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. lewiswork.etsy.com Very few people get to live the dream of building their infrastructure from scratch. Dealing with a legacy setup can make it difficult to understand the exact route a cable takes through a building, and finding the right cable when you have bundles of unlabelled copper dangling out of your cable sleeving can be a complete nightmare. In fact, even when you do have the luxury of running your own infrastructure from scratch, it's still amazing how confusing the route even well-ordered data spaghetti can become as a project progresses. That's when you need a cable tracer. There's little mystery to the purpose of a cable tracer. It's an extremely…

Maker Sean M Tracey Sean calls himself a technologist, which is a fancy way of saying he still hasn't decided what he wants to do with technology – other than everything. smt.codes In the previous tutorial, we looked at creating a variety of shapes in different sizes and colours. Now we're going to be looking at different ways of moving and manipulating those shapes over time. This tutorial covers the fundamentals of moving shapes with code; next time we'll discuss using keyboard and mouse events to control how and when things move. In this tutorial, we won't be using one single Pygame program. Instead, we have a couple of different examples, each demonstrating a different concept. Moving shapes in time and space When we think of animation, our minds might…

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 154 (rpimag.co/154), we reviewed the fabulous PicoCalc, a Raspberry Pi Pico-based device from ClockworkPi, which can be flashed to work with many different firmwares and projects. As shipped, the device has a moderately tweaked version of PicoMite (geoffg.net/picomite.html) onboard – an excellent ‘boot to BASIC’ computer, complete with the MMbasic interpreter. The PicoCalc is a great device, but it's also totally possible to play with PicoMite with just a Raspberry Pi Pico and your regular computer (Figure 1). To create a PicoMite system with a Raspberry Pi Pico, we need to set up a serial console on a regular computer.…

Before Trixie, multiple apps were used for various settings within Raspberry Pi OS – now, you can find them all listed within one handy app: Control Centre. “Control Centre is written as a very lightweight core application that loads all its functionality, at run-time, from a set of plug-in libraries, which means it can easily be extended to add new tabs with new controls,” Simon explains. “So in the future, we may add new settings pages to Control Centre, but third parties will also be able to write their own settings pages for things like controlling custom hardware.” For interested developers, information can be found on GitHub: rpimag.co/rpcc.…

Maker Marco Gerber Software engineer Marco is an expert in cloud architecture and a Python coder, but a relative newcomer to Raspberry Pi. rpimag.co/heartheworldgit Swiss software engineer and cloud architecture specialist Marco Gerber enjoys getting hands-on with tech in his free time as well as at work. His expertise in machine learning led him to recognise the potential for a handheld AI device that could describe the surrounding environment and that could be particularly useful as an accessibility tool for people with hearing or visual impairments. His idea was to develop a “point and shoot” device that would provide an audio description of the user's surroundings. The result was the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W-based Hear The World device, which offers both text and spoken descriptions alongside haptic feedback. His idea…

Maker Joyce Lin Joyce shares hands-on Raspberry Pi builds that teach the fundamentals of robotics. rpimag.co/fingerlock In an ideal world, we wouldn't need security devices but, if you have any valuables that you need to protect, you'd be in safe hands if you give Joyce Lin's project a try. She's created a robust lock that lets users scan their fingerprint to gain physical access to a box. Such is its versatility, it could also be used to unlock all sorts of items. “I was inspired to create the fingerprintcontrolled lock after using a fingerprint reader for my garage door,” she says. “I loved it so much that I started thinking of other ways to use the same sensor, like unlocking a physical box to store the souls of my enemies – or…

Maker Ben Everard Ben is a light artist who has shown NeoPixel-based art at light festivals around the UK. glowingart.co.uk Let's start with the very basics – what are NeoPixels? The simple answer is that they're a type of RGB LED that are chainable so that you can control vast numbers of them with a single GPIO pin on a microcontroller or computer. The official product name for this is WS2812B or WS2811; the name ‘NeoPixel’ comes from Adafruit, which did a lot to popularise the products (and wrote a lot of the early software to control them, so you'll often see that the library used to control them is called NeoPixel). The slightly more complex answer is that there's a whole ecosystem of similar LEDs. The most famous of which…

Maker KG Orphanides KG is a game developer, writer, and musician with a special interest in retro gaming. They have worked for Kitsune Games, mentioned in this feature. rpimag.co/owlbear Raspberry Pi is built on ARM64 architecture, which isn't compatible with most games, although some have been specifically ported, and retro games can be played via ARM64-compatible rebuilds of their game engines or emulation tools such as DOSBox. Although GOG is usually our first port of call, this month we've mostly been playing games on Steam, the most popular and Linux-friendly gaming storefront. We're getting our software from the Pi-Apps repository, which gives you custom builds of popular applications for ARM64 hardware. Manage your expectations when it comes to performance Raspberry Pi 5, 500, and 500+, in particular, are powerful enough for…

Maker Richard Smedley A tech writer, programmer, and web developer with a long history in computers, who is also in music and art. about.me/RichardSmedley Take a look at that blinking cursor on your terminal: pi@raspberrypi ~ $. The $ is known as the ‘dollar prompt’, awaiting your command; before it you see the ~ (tilde), shorthand for ‘home’ – which is /home/pi in our case (yours is probably different). Before that is [user name]@ [computer name], in the form pi@raspberrypi. Not only is this informative (at least if you've forgotten who and where you are), but it's also something you can change and personalise. New user If more than one person uses your Raspberry Pi, you can set up user accounts for each person. Creating a new user in Raspberry…

For those who may not know, Raspberry Pi OS is based off the popular Linux distribution Debian. Debian is used as the base for other popular operating systems, such as Ubuntu, and a special version of it quickly became the default OS for Raspberry Pi. Every two years, Debian receives a major update, and now is that time, so say goodbye to Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm and welcome in Raspberry Pi OS Trixie. We've got the lowdown on what's new for this major update – including interface tweaks and behind-the-scenes upgrades – from Simon Long, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Raspberry Pi. “We've got the lowdown on what's new” HOW TO INSTALL TRIXIE Step 1 It's best to install from scratch. From a regular PC, download Raspberry Pi Imager (rpimag.co/imager) and…

Retro gaming is one of the most popular uses of a Raspberry Pi, taking advantage of its low cost, power, and ability to easily run emulation software to replicate many classic consoles and computers. The easiest way to get started is to install an emulation OS/environment such as RetroPie, Lakka, Recalbox, or Batocera – all of which feature emulators for a wide range of systems, from NES to PlayStation 2. While most Raspberry Pi models can be used, if you want to emulate more powerful systems reliably and smoothly, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 is recommended. While you can use a standard Raspberry Pi desktop setup with keyboard and monitor, there are many ways to enhance your retro gaming experience. This could involve anything from plugging in a USB games…

Name Grant Sinclair Occupation Inventor Community role Creator of GamerCard URL grantsinclair.com Sir Clive Sinclair introduced many of us to programming with the ZX Spectrum. Now his nephew Grant is making gaming and coding more accessible to today's kids, with his grab-and-go GamerCard. It ships with platform game Bloo Kid 2 and shoot-'em-up AstroBlaze DX, both ported from the Nintendo Switch. There will be an app store for more and the PICO-8 Splore browser for new retro-style games. You can add your own emulators, too. There are two control pads, which each have four dome buttons underneath. We sat down with Grant to find out more. What inspired GamerCard? I found out that they sell billions of gift cards and they're normally right near the cash register and often gaming…