Astrophotography Autoguider project showcase

Reading Time: 4 minutesCreating stunning photographs of the night sky requires planning, patience, and reliable star-tracking equipment. A desire to travel a little lighter led keen amateur astronomer Joe Kutner to embark on his first Raspberry Pi project. Joe Kutner (aka Codefinger) is a software architect at Salesforce.com, where he works primarily with Java and other open-source technologies. […]

GPIO Xmas Tree review

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe GPIO Xmas Tree is something like that – and probably the easiest one to code yet! It’s also nice and small, sitting over six GPIO pins rather than taking up all 40. This way, you can add a little festive flair to your Raspberry Pi, while still working on other projects that require the […]

Retro computing with Raspberry Pi 4 in The MagPi issue 88

Reading Time: 3 minutesPJ Evans shows you how to put a Raspberry Pi inside an old ZX Spectrum+ computer, hooking it up to the innards. Discover how to connect a Raspberry Pi GPIO pins to the keyboard of a classic machine and use it to emulate the original computer. Plus! Discover where to find classic games and the […]

Win a PiArm robot arm kit!

Reading Time: < 1 minuteSave 37% off the cover price with a subscription to The MagPi magazine. Try three issues for just £5, then pay £25 every six issues. You’ll save money and get a regular supply of in-depth reviews, features, guides and other PC enthusiast goodness delivered directly to your door every month. Subscribe

DNA Gel Imager project showcase

Reading Time: 5 minutesResearch labs and hospitals use multimillion-pound equipment for detailed DNA tests, but when part of the kit goes wrong, a low-cost alternative may be urgently needed. Dr Lindsay Clark found herself in exactly this situation when the gel imager she relied on to expose DNA samples broke down. The machine that broke down was another […]

UK train departure screen

Reading Time: 4 minutesGiven the time of year, we can perhaps expect some leaves on the line, slippery rain or maybe, if the weather takes a real turn for the worse, the wrong type of snow. But in any case, Chris Hutchinson will be as prepared as any commuter can be thanks to his Raspberry Pi computer.  Chris […]

Cryptography ICE Cube experiment

Reading Time: 4 minutesIn space, nobody can hear you scream, but there are some people who are determined to eavesdrop on communication being sent back and forth between Earth and orbiting satellites. As such, there is a danger that security and safety can become compromised, which is why a team of researchers at the European Space Agency (ESA) […]

Top 10 AI projects

Reading Time: 4 minutesMachine learning and AI are just a normal part of the world now, which in some ways is kind of hard to process. On the plus side, it means we can have computers do really fun, useful (and useless) stuff for us. Here are ten ways to get your Raspberry Pi to learn and do.  […]

Alex Mous interview

Reading Time: 3 minutesOne of the original purposes of Raspberry Pi was to help ignite a passion for computing in young people today, and Alex is definitely one of these people. “In 2014, I received my first Raspberry Pi (a Model B+) for Christmas,” he tells us. “I started out by teaching myself Python using the projects in […]

Build a Raspberry Pi cluster computer

Reading Time: 7 minutesRaspberry Pi computers are famously cheap and cheerful. Great for playing around with and the odd little project, right? Well, sometimes.  However, our little friend is a surprisingly powerful computer and when you get lots of them working together, amazing things can happen.  The concept of computer ‘clusters’ (many computers working together as one) is nothing […]

Perpetual Chimes project showcase

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe Perpetual Chimes project is very clever – a set of augmented wind chimes which, since they are indoors, require the user to interact with them in order to create an escapist soundscape played through headphones. Frazer Merrick, a sound artist and educator, Frazer enjoys circuit bending, field recording, and physical computing. He came up […]

Flirc Raspberry Pi 4 case review

Reading Time: 3 minutesHere’s where things get clever: inside the case is a protruding heat sink that reaches down to Raspberry Pi 4’s CPU. This turns the whole of the aluminium case into a giant heat sink, cooling down your Raspberry Pi 4. Inside the pack is a square thermal pad (similar in substance to Blu Tack). You […]

Code Club India collaboration success

Reading Time: 2 minutesOver the last few months, Pratham Education Foundation and Code Club have successfully piloted a programme across 40 villages in rural areas of two Indian states, supporting children and young volunteers there to get hands-on with coding.  Pratham (pratham.org.in) is one of India’s largest NGOs (non-governmental organisations). It was established in 1995 with the aim […]

Homebrew retro gaming: legal ROMs for RetroPie and Lakka

Reading Time: 6 minutesFree legal ROMs for RetroPie and Lakka Many ROMs are protected by copyright, and it is illegal to download copyrighted ROMs from the internet. But there are lots and lots of legal ROMs for RetroPie and Lakka. We use these ROMs to test out Lakka and RetroPie, and to demonstrate how to set up games […]

Design retro game maps and levels in PICO-8

Reading Time: 6 minutesIn this tutorial we will be turning our simple one-screen space shooter into a scrolling shoot-’em-up! You’ll learn how to use PICO‑8’s handy map editor to quickly and easily draw out levels, and how to use the sprite editor to create terrain tiles. We’ll talk about using sprite flags to distinguish between background and foreground […]

Social Media without the Internet

Reading Time: 4 minutesIf you’re anything like us, you probably spend many hours liking, following, and friending on social media. But have you ever pondered how this kind of digital interaction might transfer to the real world? It’s a concept that interactive artist Tuang Thongborisute wanted to explore, leading her to create the ‘Social Media without the Internet’ […]

PiArm review

Reading Time: 3 minutesYou’ll need a spare hour or two to assemble the arm, using a large array of parts and different-sized screws. While the assembly guide booklet is well illustrated (and there’s a video guide online), we found a few confusing discrepancies, including an annoying bit where we assembled a section, only to have to dismantle it […]

ALBATROS radio astronomy Product Showcase

Reading Time: 5 minutesALBATROS is one of our favourite daft things in science: a backronym. It was originally created to mean ‘Array of Long Baseline Antennas for Taking Radio Observations from the Subantarctic’, as it started on the island of Marion which has a lot of albatrosses. “We want to make a map of the sky at low […]

Build a 4K media player in The MagPi issue 87

Reading Time: 3 minutesWe asked Raspberry Pi specialist Wes Archer to run through the ideal build for a media player. Wes shows us the right hardware to buy, including cases, cables, and remote controls. He then walks through the LibreELEC setup process. Going above and beyond the basic setup, our Build a 4K Media Player feature demonstrates how […]

Win one of five SmartiPi Touch 2 cases!

Reading Time: < 1 minuteSave 37% off the cover price with a subscription to The MagPi magazine. Try three issues for just £5, then pay £25 every six issues. You’ll save money and get a regular supply of in-depth reviews, features, guides and other PC enthusiast goodness delivered directly to your door every month. Subscribe

Powerful Raspberry Pi Projects: part III

Reading Time: 6 minutesRadical robots We couldn’t leave our little robotic friends out of our powerful projects round-up, now could we? Robot Dinosaurs Maker: Dr Lucy Rogers It’s not often dinosaurs are disappointing, but when the animatronic dinosaurs of the Isle of Wight theme park Blackgang Chine kept failing, Lucy came to the rescue. Retrofitting the bespoke mechanics […]

Steam Link on Raspberry Pi 4

Reading Time: 2 minutesEssentially, it’s a local network streaming service that allows you to stream games from a gaming PC to another computer hooked up to a screen. There used to be dedicated hardware for this, but it has been available for Raspberry Pi (and other hardware) for a while now. With the release of Raspberry Pi 4 […]