The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2022

The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2022The latest issue of The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook, an annual aimed at those looking to find out what they can do with their Raspberry Pi, is out now – and in it you’ll find my in-depth coverage of the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board.

Within the special dedicated Raspberry Pi Pico section of the annual is my two-page introduction to the board, an in-depth spread covering its specifications and the various components which make up the hardware – with plenty of high-quality photography, taken in my in-house studio – and an explanation of exactly what a microcontroller is and how the RP2040 at the heart of the Raspberry Pi Pico works.

You’ll also find my guide to programming the Pico in MicroPython and C/C++, an interview with chief operating officer James Adams and senior engineering manager Nick Francis, comment from Eben Upton, a simple hardware “hello, world” tutorial in MicroPython, and a step-by-step guide to safely soldering headers onto the Raspberry Pi Pico’s general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins.

There’s also a brief overview of my book, Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico – which, for those who want to explore the topic further, is available as a free PDF download under a Creative Commons licence.

The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2022 is available in all good newsagents and bookstores now, online with global delivery, or as a DRM-free download under a permissive Creative Commons licence.

The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2021

The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2021This year’s holiday release from Raspberry Pi Press is The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2021, a tome which collects 200 pages of content previously published in The MagPi and makes it available ready for wrapping and nestling under the tree.

My primary contribution for this year’s Handbook centres around the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest single-board computer in the Raspberry Pi family. Built into a keyboard housing, the most-in-one layout is a new venture for Raspberry Pi – and you’ll find my imagery in the book’s getting started section for newcomers.

You’ll also find a six-page abridged edition of my Raspberry Pi 400 feature from The MagPi Issue 100, down from the original twelve with the main removal being the detailed benchmarking. The new thinner variant still includes plenty of imagery, including a graphical tour of all the external features and ports found on the Raspberry Pi 400, plus my interview with its designer Simon Martin and Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton.

You’ll find more of my work scattered throughout, too, including screenshots and tutorials cribbed from The Official Raspberry PI Beginner’s Guide 4th Edition – along with a wealth of material from my fellow MagPi contributors.

The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2021 is available to buy now with global delivery, or to download as a DRM-free Creative Commons-licensed PDF, on the official website.

The MagPi, Issue 100

The MagPi Issue 100For this bumper issue of The MagPi, celebrating 100 issues since its launch as a fanzine and subsequent adoption as the official Raspberry Pi magazine, I take a deep dive into the company’s latest single-board computer: the very-nearly-all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400.

Built into a keyboard housing, the Raspberry Pi 400 is almost everything you need: just add a USB Type-C power supply, microSD, mouse, and display. For those buying the Personal Computer Kit – previously the Desktop Kit – that’s reduced to only needing an external display. Better still, the design includes the Raspberry Pi family’s first passive cooling system – and a speed boost from 1.5GHz to 1.8GHz.

Across the hefty 12-page feature I take the reader on a visual tour of the new board’s external ports and internal features – stripping it down to the surprisingly large single-board computer ensconced within – before taking a break for an interview with principal hardware engineer Simon Martin and Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton on the project’s origins and development.

Benchmarks follow, putting hard numbers to the speed boost that has seen the CPU clocked from the default 1.5GHz on the Raspberry Pi 4 to 1.8GHz on the Raspberry Pi 400. As with previous launches, these include historical measurements going all the way back to the original Raspberry Pi Model A and Model B – detailing the performance of every board, bar the industrial-focus Compute Modules, across synthetic and real-world workloads.

The full review is available now in The MagPi Issue 100 from supermarkets and newsagents, online with global delivery, or as a free Creative Commons licensed PDF download on the official website.

The MagPi, Issue 94

The MagPi Issue 94This month’s The MagPi Magazine celebrates the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB, the latest single-board computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation – and the most expensive and highest-specification model to boot.

My cover feature for the launch begins with an overview of the board, which is effectively identical to the previous 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB models bar the memory module in use. With 8GB of LPDDR4 on board, it has twice the memory of its nearest predecessor – and eight times the entry-level model, since pseudo-retired when falling memory prices brought the cost of the 2GB model down to the same level as the 1GB.

The next two pages diverge from my usual launch-day coverage, replacing benchmarks with a dive into the sort of use-cases that could justify moving from 4GB to 8GB of RAM: storage caching, disk-free computing, in-memory databases, virtual machines and containerised applications, machine learning and the like.

The reason for the shift away from benchmarking is simple: in repeated testing the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB proved absolutely identical in performance to any other model of Raspberry Pi 4, unless the workload exceeded available free memory. While it would have been easy to develop synthetic benchmarks which would show a dramatic improvement in performance for the new model, it would have been misleading to anyone expecting to see a speed boost for day-to-day computing.

From there, the feature moves on to an interview with Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton on the timing of the launch – “[it is] absolutely as soon as we can,” he told me during the interview, “the memory packages we’re using are literally some of the first off the production line, a brand-new, shiny memory technology” – the sort of user the new model targets, the Foundation’s work on a 64-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS which launches in beta today alongside the new board, and the future of the Raspberry Pi 4 range which, sadly, is not likely to include a 16GB model.

The full feature is available to read now in The MagPi Issue 94, available to purchase with global delivery or to download as a free Creative Commons-licensed PDF on the official website.

The MagPi, Issue 93

The MagPi Issue 93In this month’s The MagPi Magazine you’ll find my cover feature on working from home using a Raspberry Pi as a fully-functional desktop computer – and, as an added bonus, my photography of the TBBlue ZX Spectrum Next.

First, the cover feature. With a massive explosion in the number of people working remotely worldwide, and the corresponding shortages in hardware and accessories, now is a great time to look towards the Raspberry Pi as a functional alternative to traditional PCs. The six-page feature is split into three sections. The first of these sections looks at installing a Raspberry Pi Camera Module – or the newly-launched Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera Module – or USB webcam and using it for video conferencing via Google Hangouts.

The second section looks at online collaboration platforms, from Google Docs and Google Drive to Slack, Discord, and Firefox Send. The last section takes a look at LibreOffice, the open-source equivalent to Microsoft Office which is pre-installed in Raspbian Linux and fully compatible with the Raspberry Pi. Finally, a sprinkling of tips and tricks complete the feature.

The ZX Spectrum Next review, meanwhile, was written by The MagPi’s editor Lucy Hattersly, but illustrated by me: My hero shot of the ZX Spectrum Next, plus a close-up of the Rick Dickinson-designed keyboard which proved responsible for a two-year delay on the device as it was tweaked for maximum quality and performance, grace the two-page feature alongside a pair of images taken from the ZX Spectrum Next promotional materials.

All this, and more, is available in both the print edition and the free Creative Commons-licensed PDF download from the official magazine website.

The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book, Volume 5

The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book Volume 5Raspberry Pi Press has launched the fifth entry in the ongoing Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book series, a family of bookazine-style publications gathering hands-on content previously published in The MagPi Magazine – and, as usual, my content is included.

The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book Volume 5 is the first volume to be published since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 family – the first in a new generation of single-board computers which brings with it a considerably more powerful processor, the first new graphics processor in Raspberry Pi history, two high-speed USB 3.0 ports, true gigabit-capable Ethernet, and dual-4k display compatibility.

While the bulk of the projects in the book are suitable for any model of Raspberry Pi, there’s some Raspberry Pi 4 exclusive stuff too – in particular my detailed look at the boards, originally written for the Mag Pi’s launch feature. The first feature in the book, it covers the specifications and features of the new board, a look at its performance in a range of synthetic and real-world workloads and including throughput on both Wi-Fi and Ethernet network connections, and two two-page interview spreads with user experience engineer Simon Long and Raspberry Pi Foundation co-founder Eben Upton on both the Raspberry Pi 4 and the new Raspbian ‘Buster’ operating system launched at the same time.

There’s only one thing missing compared to the original version of the feature: thermal performance, including the high-resolution thermal imagery I take of devices on test. There’s a good reason for that: in the latest issue of The MagPi I provided a twelve-page in-depth investigation into the thermal performance of the Raspberry Pi 4 since its launch to the present day through a string of firmware updates designed to decrease power usage and heat output. This represents a considerably more up-to-date look at the board’s thermal performance than in the original launch feature, and it’s entirely sensible to exclude the original test from its republication.

The book is available to buy now in all good supermarkets, newsagents, and for global delivery from the official website; alternatively, a DRM-free PDF copy can be downloaded free of charge under a Creative Commons licence.

PC Pro, Issue 302

PC Pro Issue 302Following on from my group test of small form factor machines in Issue 297, this month’s PC Pro magazine sees me take the helm of the regular Labs Test once again to put nine more traditional desktop PCs through their paces – with some available for as little as £300 including a Windows 10 Home licence.

The feature follows the usual Labs format: an introduction is followed by a features table listing all the key specifications, including pricing and warranty data, on each of the nine machines on-test; four large focus reviews follow, along with six shorter reviews; there’s a two-page buyer’s guide with hints and tips on getting the most bang for your buck; the View from the Labs opinion editorial; and a full-page feature-in-feature which, this month, takes a tour of the desktop PC’s storied history from the minicomputer era forwards – with special mention, of course, to IBM’s Personal Computer and the horde of ‘IBM Compatibles’ which followed.

Each machine on test was photographed inside and out in my in-house studio, disassembled to check the fit and finish as well as confirm how upgradeable each design is post-purchase, and tested through a gamut of benchmarks including power draw, productivity performance, gaming performance – less of a focus for this Labs than most, owing to the fact many machines are at the very bottom of the budget and designed more for general-purpose computing than blasting aliens – as well as browser performance and disk speed. This Labs also comes with an added bonus: boot timings for each machine, measuring how long it takes each to load Windows ready for use from a cold start.

As always, these group tests wouldn’t be possible without the cooperation of the hardware vendors themselves. My thanks go out to CCL, Palicomp, PC Specialist, QuietPC, Chillblast, Cyberpower, and Currys PC World for their assistance with hardware loans, and also to Box.co.uk for the loan of a system which was unfortunately not able to be included in the group this time around. A special thanks, too, goes to UL Benchmarks and Unigine for the provision of benchmarking software used in the test.

The full feature is available in PC Pro Issue 302, on-shelves now at supermarkets, newsagents, and on the hard drives of the usual digital distribution services.

Raspberry Pi Geek, Issue 09-10/2019

Raspberry Pi Geek Issue 09-10/2019The launch of the new Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer brought with it, as usual, my detailed analysis over on Medium. The post has drawn considerable interest, in particular the benchmarking and thermal imagery aspects. German publisher Computec got in touch shortly after publication to ask if they could licence the post for translation and republication in the local enthusiast magazine Raspberry Pi Geek – and that issue is on shelves now.

Effectively a blow-by-blow recreation of the Medium post, translated and reformatted for the confines of a paper magazine, the seven-page feature walks through what’s new in the design, carries out numerous benchmark tests from synthetic and real-world performance workloads to power draw and – as has become a signature of mine – high-quality thermal imagery showing just where the extra power demanded by the Raspberry Pi 4 is going on the board.

Each benchmark includes a graph for easy at-a-glance performance comparisons between the new model and every version back to the original launch Model B. High-quality photography of the board and its various components are also featured, and have translated particularly well to the page.

Raspberry Pi Geek Issue 09-10/2019 is on shelves now in Germany, and is also available from Computec’s online outlet.

The MagPi, Issue 83

The MagPi Issue 83This week saw the release of the Raspberry Pi 4, first in a new generation of single-board computers from the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation. As is usual for the launches, I was approached by The MagPi Magazine – the Foundation’s official publication – to prepare coverage for the launch, including interviews, imagery, and a wealth of benchmarks.

My coverage for the magazine, spread across a whopping 12 pages, begins with a high-resolution hero shot of the board with macro-image call-outs for its key features and components – including the new USB Type-C power connector, BCM2711B0 system-on-chip, and shiny dual-micro-HDMI video outputs capable of driving high-resolution 4K displays.

Next, there’s an interview with Foundation co-founder Eben Upton covering everything from the reason the board is available now when a 2020 launch had previously been suggested, how it can potentially replace a desktop PC in a range of environments, backwards compatibility with the existing Raspberry Pi ecosystem, and a hidden Easter Egg on the PCB – only accessible to those brave or foolhardy enough to unsolder the USB connector.

The benchmarking section, spread across four pages, marks a departure from previous launches: this time around I pulled the focus away from synthetic benchmarks, though the classic Linpack still makes an appearance if only to demonstrate how the Arm processors’ NEON extensions can dramatically improve performance, in favour of a variety of real-world workloads: image editing with the GIMP, file compression with bzip2 and lbzip2, browser performance in Chromium, and gaming performance with OpenArena, alongside USB, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi throughputs. In all cases, the workloads are entirely reproducible: all packages used for the real-world workloads are available at launch in the Raspbian Buster software repositories. If four pages isn’t enough, additional benchmarks are available on my Medium post.

As usual, the benchmarking also includes a thermal analysis: images of the Raspberry Pi 4 and its immediate predecessor the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ were taken after a ten-minute CPU-heavy workload using a Flir thermal imaging camera, the data processed to a fixed temperature scale of 22-80°C to avoid noise from ambient surfaces, then overlaid on an edge-enhanced high-resolution visible-light image of their respective boards using a high-contrast rainbow colour palette. These images represent a fair amount of work, but there’s no better way to see both how hot the Pis get under continuous load and which components are responsible for that heat – not to mention how effective the design is at bleeding the heat off through the PCB, something with which the older Raspberry Pi models with plastic-encased chips have struggled.

Finally, the piece closes with a two-page interview with Simon Long on the new Raspbian ‘Buster’ operating system – launching ahead of the upstream Debian 10 ‘Buster’ release, interestingly – and its revised, flatter user interface. While much of the under-the-hood work for Buster was to get it ready for the Raspberry Pi 4 – previous Raspbian releases won’t work on the new board – it’s also available for older Raspberry Pi models, and comes with some convincing reasons to upgrade along with a handful of software compatibility issues that offer a reason to hang fire.

As always, The MagPi Issue 83 is available to buy in print format from all good newsagents, supermarkets, and book sellers; a free digital copy, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NoCommercial licence, is also available from the official website.

PC Pro, Issue 297

PC Pro Issue 297The Labs Test in this month’s PC Pro is something of a bumper one: I ran a whopping 14 miniature PCs, from a cleverly cased Raspberry Pi up to a behemoth of a system squeezing in an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, through a gamut of tests including size and weight, power draw, productivity and gaming benchmarks to see which would come out on top.

The work of a solid few weeks, the Labs saw system after system bouncing onto and off the test bench. As well as requiring the actual testing, all photography was carried out in-house – with thanks to my wife, who served as a hand model for the article’s hero shot – with each system photographed from all angles and internally, plus a smart isometric view in which the scale is maintained so the reader can easily compare the relative sizes of each machine on test. Given that the feature is about miniature PCs, such easy at-a-glance comparison is key to knowing which machine meets the readers’ personal requirements.

A Labs Test like this wouldn’t be possible without the cooperation of a range of companies, of course, and I’d like to thank the suppliers of machines for the test: ASRock, Asus, Intel, Mini-ITX.com, Lenovo, QuietPC, Raspberry Pi, and Shuttle. Additional thanks go to Intel, Nvidia, and Overclockers UK, who provided components required to build up the bare-bones systems on test.

As is traditional for a PC Pro Labs Test, the content is split between reviews – four 700-word focus reviews and ten 350-word supplementary reviews – and features, including an interview with Intel’s Ed Barkhuysen on the company’s modular vision for the future of computing, a buyer’s guide covering things to consider when making the move to an ultra-small-form-factor (USFF) system, a two-page features table covering everything you could want to know about each system on test, a look at external GPU (eGPU) products as a way of expanding the performance of mini-PCs, and a “View from the Labs” opinion editorial to round things out.

This feature also marks the first time the in-house PC Pro benchmark suite – which measures system performance for image editing, video playback, and multitasking workloads – has been run not only on Linux-based, rather than Windows, systems but also on a Raspberry Pi. To achieve that, I worked to port the PowerShell-based suite to the Bash shell while using the same cross-platform applications to ensure each platform can be compared as fairly as possible.

PC Pro Issue 297 is available now at all good supermarkets, newsagents, and digitally via Zinio and similar services.