Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #158

rpimag.co At last! I can finally talk about the incredible new computer that Raspberry Pi has been working on. I am writing this on my brand new Raspberry Pi 500+ in Pi Towers, Cambridge. I’ve got a matching one on my desk at home and am syncing the two together. These are my computers now. Everything I write is done with a Raspberry Pi 500+. The keyboard is amazing. An absolute joy to type on. The whole computer is self-contained within the keyboard design, and it’s incredibly fast. Thanks to the 2.4GHz Arm CPU, 16GB RAM, and an M.2 NVMe SSD, it skips along without missing a beat. Even if 500+ was running Windows or macOS, it would be swift. But because my 500+ is running Raspberry Pi OS based…

Raspberry Pi has released a smaller variant of Touch Display 2, its touchscreen solution for Raspberry Pi. The new variant features a smaller, 5-inch, display with a simplified form factor. “Last year we launched the refreshed 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 as a successor to our original 2015 Touch Display, offering a simplified form factor and higher 720×1280-pixel resolution at the same $60 price point. Today we’re excited to announce a new 5-inch variant, available to buy now from Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers. It shares the same resolution and easy setup as the 7-inch variant, at the low price of $40,” says Gordon Hollingworth, Chief Technology Officer, Software at Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 allows seamless integration with the rest of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. “Its capacitive touchscreen…

Elvis Andrés Ayala, an electronics engineer who is passionate about developing accessible technology for space exploration, wrote to us to share the progress of his project Trinidad, which has been made possible thanks to Raspberry Pi hardware. Extreme conditions Last year, Elvis had the opportunity to participate in a NASA scientific mission, EMIDSS (Experimental Module for the Iterative Design of Satellite Subsystems), during which he launched the first version of the Trinidad system: an image acquisition module based on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3, housed in a 3D-printed enclosure. This device was able to reach an average altitude of 42km in the stratosphere, where it successfully captured images (example below) under extreme conditions, including temperatures below -50°C. Sensory upgrade This year, Elvis had…

rapidlab.io Parrots may not be a common sight in Poland, but the city of Gliwice is home to an Ecuadorian restaurant named after the bird (‘loro’ in Spanish), and its owners thought a talking parrot could make for some effective marketing. The Locoloro street food restaurant sells a fairly traditional range of empanadas and other South American snacks and dishes, which visitors to the city will remember thanks to its distinctive parrot logo. Using Raspberry Pi and AI to bring the iconic bird to life seemed like a fun but memorable way of piquing customers’ interest and entertaining them while they queued. Talking point Gliwice is a small but thriving city in Upper Silesia, Poland with plenty of hospitality options, but a harsh climate. The attractive medieval city attracts plenty of…

rpimag.co/verticalrunner Many Raspberry Pi projects are created for use in the real-world. Not Vertical Runner. This one was designed as a film prop for a short science-fiction thriller that James Reeves was writing with his wife. It was set to star a lonely, introverted, skilled hacker looking to access rare cars and it was going to be shot at night. “I wanted a really strong title sequence showing our main character coding, printing, and assembling and I wanted something unique as her main hacking tool,” James says. “It needed to be an extension of the main character and look great on film at night, perhaps in a phone booth, around a corner, or adjacent to a neon sign.” James also wanted his device to double as a principal light source…

rpimag.co/instcamzero Warning! Burn Risk This project includes a thermal printer (EM5820) which becomes hot during operation and may cause burns if touched immediately after use. The first ever commercially available instant camera was released in 1948. Created by Edwin Land, it was manufactured by Polaroid, sidestepping the need to spend ages processing traditional film in a darkroom. At first, the Land Camera would output sepia-tone prints. Two years later, it was printing in black and white and, by 1963, it was surprising consumers with colour. But even though the popularity of instant prints waned in the 1980s, there’s still no mistaking the joy of being able to see an image form before your eyes in double-quick time. It’s why, despite having a pick of amazing digital cameras – including those…