Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #160

rpimag.co It’s that time of year when the snow starts to settle, the days are short, and the nights are mostly spent putting up gaudy decorations, watching television, playing video games, and getting ready to eat far too much food. Before that though, there is the annual buying of the presents. We love Christmas here at Raspberry Pi. Rob loves Christmas more than all of us combined, so he and Rosie have put together a massive Christmas shopping and projects feature. Give somebody the gift of a better, and more fun, computer or treat yourself to a new project. Ben has finished his Christmas lights tutorial so you can make the winter nights look a bit warmer with NeoPixels. There’s also a quiz of the year for you to put…

At the start of October, we released the Trixie version of Raspberry Pi OS. One of the changes we made was to revamp the Bookshelf application to give contributors access to subscriber-only titles, so we thought we’d talk a bit more about that decision. Distribution change Some time back, we made a change to how our e-books were distributed. Originally, we made all the PDFs of our books available for free on the day they were released, but in 2023 we began expanding the distribution of our print and electronic titles. Before then, our only third-party distribution was through resellers and booksellers in the UK and Ireland. We were entirely absent from e-book channels like Kindle, Google Play Books, and Apple Books, and our print titles were not reliably available…

rpimag.co/alientracker As fans of the Alien movies will no doubt agree, the M314 Motion Detector is a cool piece of kit. Aside from being super-useful – the Colonial Marines would certainly have struggled to detect the presence of aliens without its ultrasound capabilities – the handheld device, with its rugged military looks, was also something of a design masterpiece. Over the years, many people have replicated the prop, right down to the iconic, suspense-building, beeping sound made as it locks on to movement. Among those enthusiasts is Rob Smith, who first toyed with the idea of making such a device ten years ago. He’d stumbled across the RCWL-0516 Arduino radar module and instantly thought of Aliens. “It would just react to nearby movement,” he says. And so began a quest…

rpimag.co/drumcard Want to drum your name into someone’s memory at a network event? Then Sergey Antonovich has you covered. The embedded systems engineer has reinvented the age-old business card by turning it into a playable electronic drum kit – and we’d hazard a guess that this one won’t end up languishing forgotten in someone’s pocket. Sergey got the idea for the project some months ago. He enjoys building digital musical instruments including ultra-portable all-in-one digital accordions and he was inspired by business cards which fit an entire Linux system on a tiny PCB. Producing a business card which could be played felt like a natural fit. “It does three jobs at once,” he says. “It instantly grabs attention when you hand it over, it communicates exactly what I do, and…

rpimag.co/Banamera Despite the constant errors in AI generated images, the software behind AI is getting better all the time. Actually, that’s wrong – it’s not despite the errors, it’s because of the errors. AI isn’t actually intelligent; it’s just recognising patterns. More data equals better results. One of the more recent image editors is Google’s Nano Banana, the abilities of which have pleasantly surprised maker Nick Bild. And in true maker fashion, Nick has designed and built his own machine to take the best of Nano Banana and improve it. The problem that this build solves is Nano Banana’s clunky interface. In Nick’s own words, “the web interface is less than ideal. Upload an image. Type out a request. Wait. Download the result. Repeat for each image.” Banamera streamlines this…

rpimag.co/Gigapixel One of this author’s first jobs was scanning film transparencies for a publishing company, and using an early version of Photoshop to edit out the scratches that had been caused by the transparencies having been kept in a shoebox seemingly full of grit. The scanner in question was a large box containing, among other things, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) optical sensor. It was slow and fiddly, but in the early 2000s it was still better than the digital cameras of the time. In the quest for ever greater image resolution, some enterprising hardware hackers have tried taking the CCDs out of scanners and repackaging them into high-resolution, though bulky cameras. With this project Yannick is going several steps further than this, by reverse-engineering the CCD so that a Raspberry…