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 MagPi, Issue 106

The MagPi Issue 106This month’s issue of The MagPi Magazine includes another of my tutorials for those looking to get started with the MicroPython platform on the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller: a Pico-powered burglar alarm driven by one or more passive infrared sensors.

Originally written as part of Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico: The Official Guide, my guide to physical computing on Raspberry Pi’s first-ever microcontroller development board, the burglar alarm tutorial builds up step-by-step from introducing a single passive infrared motion sensor to interfacing with multiple sensors, printing status reports over the serial console, and triggering a piezoelectric buzzer in place of a real alarm’s rather louder horn.

As with other tutorials written for the book, full source code – in MicroPython – is provided, along with wiring references designed to make it as easy as possible to add the components to a Raspberry Pi Pico installed on a solderless breadboard. There’s scope for further extension, too: adding break-beam sensors, glass-break sensors, or a code pad for disabling and enabling the alarm on-demand.

The MagPi Issue 106 is available at now at all good newsagents and supermarkets, online with global delivery, or as a Creative Commons-licensed DRM-free zero-cost PDF download on the official website.

Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico: The Official Guide

Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico

Today’s launch of the Raspberry Pi Pico, an affordable breadboard-friendly development board accessible enough for education and powerful enough for industrial use, comes alongside the launch of my latest book: Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico: The Official Raspberry Pi Pico Guide.

Building on my earlier title The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico offers newcomers to both the Raspberry Pi Pico and the MicroPython programming language an easy way to get started. Building up from an introduction to the board, electronic circuit concepts, MicroPython in general, and MicroPython on the Raspberry Pi Pico specifically, the book walks through a series of physical computing projects – some requiring only the Raspberry Pi Pico, others using low-cost and readily-available additional hardware components.

Each successive project introduces a new concept, from simply lighting an LED and reading a button input to using hardware interrupts, running code on the second CPU core, and making use of the on-board non-volatile flash memory to store logged data. By the end of the book, the reader should know how to use all the most important features of the Raspberry Pi Pico in MicroPython – even if they started knowing nothing about electronics or programming at all.

As always, thanks must be given to those who helped during the production of the book. Particular thanks must go to Ben Everard, who acted as co-editor and also contributed a chapter on using I2C and an appendix on using the programmable input/output (PIO) functionality; Sam Adler, too, returned to provide eye-catching illustrations without which the book would be a considerably duller read.

Also to be thanked are those who provided technical assistance: Alasdair Allan, Aivar Annamaa, Damien George, Gordon Hollingworth, Graham Sanderson, and Andrew Scheller, along with all those who proofed the book ahead of publication. Not forgetting, of course, others at Raspberry Pi Press who work to bring these books to life and to shelves across the world.

Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico is available to purchase in print from Raspberry Pi Press with global delivery; it is also available to download as a DRM-free PDF, under a Creative Commons free-as-in-speech licence which allows for unlimited distribution under share-alike terms – making it perfect for schools and clubs.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, 4th Edition and Translations

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide 4th EditionMy introductory Raspberry Pi book, The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, has now been released in a fourth edition, bringing updates for the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB, Raspberry Pi 400, and new software revisions.

Bundled with every Raspberry Pi Desktop Kit sold, and available in paperback and free-as-in-speech Creative Commons-licensed DRM-free PDF, The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide has proven incredibly popular. The latest release includes updates to reflect changes in the Raspberry Pi OS and bundled software, alongside coverage of the all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400 and higher-specification Raspberry Pi 4 8GB.

The new edition is also now available in translation for the first time: As well as the original English edition, The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide can now be read in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with additional translations in the works. As always, my thanks go out to the translation team at Raspberry Pi Press for making that happen.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide 4th Edition is available to buy now in all the above languages with global delivery from the official website; it can also be downloaded under free-as-in-speech terms as a Creative Commons-licensed PDF file, unencumbered by DRM. For anyone considering picking up a Raspberry Pi 400, a print copy of the book is also bundled in the Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop Kit as well as in the Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kit.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, 3rd Edition

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide Third EditionThe latest version of my beginner-focused Raspberry Pi book, The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, is now available – and it brings with it a major change to the projects included within.

The Second Edition release of the book concentrated on bringing the popular publication – bundled with all Raspberry Pi Desktop Kits – up-to-date for the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Raspbian ‘Buster’ operating system. This Third Edition, meanwhile, migrates the programming and electronics projects to newer versions of their respective development environments: Scratch 3 and the Thonny IDE.

Thonny, the default integrated development environment for Python programs, is largely just a visual change: the latest version of the software simplifies the user interface compared to earlier releases, so all instructions and screenshots in the book have been updated accordingly.

Scratch 3 is a bigger shift. As well as coming with a refreshed user interface, Scratch 3 changes certain core aspects of its operation compared to Scratch 2 – with the result that Scratch 2 programs aren’t guaranteed to work within Scratch 3 without modification. This Third Edition updates all the Scratch-based projects to ensure they work correctly in Scratch 3, complete with all-new instructions.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide Third Edition also includes a number of other improvements, from updates for other new and changed software through to a few minor errata from earlier editions.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide Third Edition is available now from all good bookshops and e-tailers, while a free PDF copy can be downloaded from the MagPi Magazine website –  or you can order a print copy for international delivery.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, 2nd Edition

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's Guide, 2nd EditionWhile today’s big news is the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer – which I have treated to a wealth of benchmarks over on Medium – it comes with a supporting product release: the second edition of the popular Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, updated for the new hardware.

Inside the book, which is being made available for purchase in a print edition and for free download and redistribution under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NoCommercial licence, the content has been overhauled and updated for the Raspberry Pi 4 and latest Raspbian ‘Buster’ operating system. From the two HDMI ports to the new USB Type-C power connector, all imagery and instructions are bang up-to-date for today’s new hardware release.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide 2nd Edition is also being bundled with the Raspberry Pi 4 as part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s official starter pack: those opting to buy their Pi that way will receive the Raspberry Pi 4, microSD with NOOBS and Raspbian ‘Buster’ pre-loaded, power supply, case, keyboard, and mouse, plus a printed copy of the book to help get them started.

As with the first edition, there’s more to the book than just plugging it in and clicking around the Raspbian desktop: you’ll find step-by-step instructions for programming in Scratch and Python, hardware projects for the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO port, and instructions and examples which use the Sense HAT and Camera Module accessories.

The book is available now in print from all good bookshops and Raspberry Pi resellers, in the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge, or can be downloaded for free under the Creative Commons licence on the official Raspberry Pi website.

Custom PC, Issue 189

Custom PC Issue 189This month, my regular Hobby Tech column opens with a look at a RISC-V based not-quite-off-the-shelf personal computer build by AB Open, walks readers through building a weather monitor powered by a Raspberry Pi and a Pimoroni Unicorn HAT, and marvels at the excesses of the computer retail scene in the 1970s and 1980s via David Pleasance’s Commodore: The Inside Story.

First, the PC. The majority of PCs on desks around the world today are based on processors which use the x86 architecture or its 64-bit equivalent; a small handful are based on similar Arm chips to the ones you might find in your smartphone; and an even smaller number are powered by things like Zilog Z80s, MOS 6502s, and Motorola 68000s belonging to people who just don’t like to throw away a perfectly good decades-old system. The system built by AB Open recently, though, is different: it’s based on RISC-V, an open instruction set architecture (ISA) for which anyone can – given time, money, and a fair smattering of expertise – build a chip.

“It might be some time before there’s an off-the-shelf chip that can compete with x86 on raw performance and traditional benchmarks,” AB Open’s Andrew Back, who for full disclosure is a client of mine, admits, “but the open nature of the ISA, and the ecosystem developing around it, is driving a renaissance in novel computer architectures.” By way of proof: a fully-functional Linux-based desktop PC, built in a custom-designed laser-cut chassis, created using the SiFive HiFive Unleashed development board and Microsemi expansion board.

From a PC you can browse the web on to one which flashes a few lights: the Raspberry Pi weather monitor is a remix of a project I published in Issue 153, to use a Pimoroni Unicorn HAT LED matrix to graph energy usage in my home. This time, the same hardware is repurposed to show animated weather icons based on data downloaded from OpenWeatherMap – and, despite the low resolution of the LED matrix, it works an absolute treat.

Finally, Commodore: The Inside Story sounds like it should be an exhaustive history of the company behind one of the world’s biggest-selling home computers. It isn’t. Instead, it’s a two-part affair: the first is a series of personally recollections, presented in a very similar fashion to the stories you might hear if you took author David Pleasance to the pub and asked him about his time working in Commodore’s sales and marketing division; the second is a collection of guest chapters, and as fun as it is reading about orgies in Consumer Electronics Show hotels and drink-driving incidents the second half is, for me, the better half.

All this, and a raft more, can be found at your nearest newsagent or supermarket; the electronic version, meanwhile, is enjoying a brief holiday while background administration relating to its recent switch of publishers takes place.

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner's GuideToday sees the release of The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide, my latest educational book on the remarkable single-board computer and its software and the first to be made available for free download and redistribution courtesy of a Creative Commons Attribition-ShareAlike-NoCommercial licence.

Written in partnership with Raspberry Pi Press, The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide walks newcomers through a tour of the Raspberry Pi and what it can do, setting up both the hardware and the software, learning how to navigate the Raspbian desktop, how to write programs in Scratch 2 and Python 3, and even building custom circuits that use the Raspberry Pi’s general-purpose input-output (GPIO) header. If that weren’t enough, there are chapters on using the Sense HAT add-on board, the Raspberry Pi Camera Module, and a handy list of additional resources for when you’ve finally exhausted the book itself.

While it’s my name on the cover, this book is very much a team effort. I’d like to thank everyone at Raspberry Pi Press who was involved in its creation, from the authors of the original projects pulled in and updated in this new publication to eternally-patient project editor Phil King, fantastic technical editor Simon Long, amazing illustrator Sam Alder, and a whole host of others without whom the book would be nowhere near as good as it has turned out.

The book is available to buy now in all good newsagents, supermarkets, and bookstores, or direct from Raspberry Pi Press. The digital edition, as a Creative Commons-licensed PDF without any digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, is available from The MagPi website now.

Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+

Back in March, the release of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+—the Pi 3 B+ to its friends—brought a chance to take stock and review just how far the project had come since its launch via a series of benchmarks. Now the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ brings a bold claim: a dramatic drop in size, weight, and price over the Pi 3 B+, but without any loss in performance.

In other words: it’s benchmark time once again.

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Custom PC, Issue 166

Custom PC Issue 166Readers of my regular Hobby Tech column this month will find a BBC micro:bit-driven tutorial alongside two reviews covering the remarkable Raspberry Pi Zero W microcomputer and the fascinating Delete by Paul Atkinson.

The idea for the tutorial came about while working on a chapter of my upcoming Micro:bit User Guide, and seemed like a perfect fit for the readers of Custom PC Magazine: turning the low-cost yet extremely flexible micro:bit into an addressable USB-connected 5×5 LED matrix and having it display current CPU load in a constantly-updating bar graph. Naturally, the same technique could be used to graph almost anything.

The secret lies in MicroPython’s REPL, an interactive interpreter which can run on the micro:bit and accept commands via the USB serial port. By switching the micro:bit into REPL mode, it can be slaved to another system over USB. The result: the entire program code, written in Python using the serial, time, and psutil libraries, exists purely on the host machine. A quick bit of Blu-tack later, and my monitor was wearing a CPU monitor which worked even when the display was off.

The Pi Zero W, meanwhile, was a device to which I had been looking forward for quite some time. An upgraded version of the original £5 Raspberry Pi Zero microcomputer, the Pi Zero W differs in only one respect: it has a built-in radio module, the same BCM43438 as found on the far larger and more expensive Raspberry Pi 3.

While the addition of the radio module, which offers Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, and 2.4GHz Wi-FI connectivity, almost doubles the price of the Pi Zero W to £9.60, it’s money well spent. In almost every Pi Zero project I have built, I’ve ended up using a USB OTG adaptor and low-cost USB Wi-Fi dongle to add network connectivity, and having it on-board – even at a slightly higher cost compared to a USB-connected solution – makes life considerably easier.

Finally, Delete. Billed as “a design history of computer vapourware,” Paul Atkinson’s coffee table book is packed with high-quality photographs – and, for the rarer machines, the occasional rescaled JPEG exhibiting unfortunate compression artefacts – covering machines from an upgraded Sinclair QL to a bright yellow IBM that never left the drawing board. Each comes with pages on its history, with interview subjects detailing features and failures alike, and while not all machines were strictly vapourware few are likely to have a place in the average vintage computing collection. In short: if you like old computers you’ll like Delete, which is available now from Amazon and other bookstores under ISBN 978-0857853479.

As always, you can read the whole column and a whole lot more by picking up Custom PC Issue 166 from your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or electronically via Zinio and similar services.