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, 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 188

Custom PC Issue 188This month’s Hobby Tech, my regular five-page column for Custom PC Magazine, takes a look at the Argon One aluminium case for the Raspberry Pi, the now Flash-free Scratch 3 visual programming environment, and Sean McManus’ Mission Python.

First, the case. Created as a single piece of aluminium with a plastic base-plate, the Argon One is more than just a means of protecting a Raspberry Pi: it includes a daughterboard that pulls the HDMI and analogue AV ports to the rear for neater cabling, another that adds a fan for active cooling and a smart power button while also bringing the GPIO header out with colour coding and silk-screened pin references on the case itself, and a magnetic cover to hide said GPIO port when it’s not in use.

More importantly, though, it’s one of only a few cases that actually improves the thermal performance of the Raspberry Pi when installed. Even ignoring the fan, which makes little practical difference to operating temperatures, the difference between uncased and cased is an impressive 24°C thanks to the use of the upper half of the case as a giant heatsink. The only real problem, and it’s one creator Argon Forty claims to be working to resolve, is the hefty voltage drop from the fan-and-power daughterboard: unless you’re using the Argon One 5.25V Power Supply or a similar compatible, expect to see frequent undervoltage throttling.

Scratch 3, meanwhile, has proven itself a worthy upgrade for the popular block-based visual programming environment first created at MIT. While switching the stage and script area around and shuffling a few of the block colours is unnecessary and potentially confusing, new features including integration with translation and text-to-speech APIs and an easy extension manager are definitely welcome – as is the departure from relying on Adobe’s Flash technology. Sadly, though, at the time of writing Scratch 3 still did not support the Raspberry Pi, though work is in progress on that front.

Finally, Mission Python: as the author of a few books myself I know only too well how tricky it is to walk the line between introducing concepts in a friendly and approachable manner and being patronising, as well as trying to aim a publication at a broad age range. Sean McManus, who is no stranger to bookstore shelves, proves it can be done with Mission Python as he walks the reader through creating a game in Python using the Pygame Zero wrapper around the Pygame library. The result is colourful and fun without being in any way condescending, and a definite recommendation for anyone interested in flexing their Python skills.

All this, and the usual selection of articles not written by me, can be found on the shelves of your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or digitally via Zinio and similar services.

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.

Custom PC, Issue 150

Custom PC Issue 150There’s a bit of a theme to four of the five pages that make up this month’s Hobby Tech column, and with little surprise: I’ve been focusing on the Raspberry Pi Zero, that remarkable £4 microcomputer which is still proving impossible for retailers to keep in stock. That’s not to say it’s entirely Pi-themed, though: I found room for a look at the lovely CodeBug, too.

Naturally, the first thing I had to do when the Raspberry Pi Zero – a fully-functional Raspberry Pi microcomputer, equivalent in specification to the Raspberry Pi Model A+ but with twice the RAM at 512MB and a new 1GHz stock speed for the BCM2835 processor. The fact that the Raspberry Pi Foundation was able to pack all that into a device around half the footprint of the already-tiny Model A+ is impressive enough, but with a retail price of just £4 the Pi Zero is nothing short of revolutionary.

Sadly, my hope that stock issues would be cleared up by the time the issue hit shop shelves proved unfounded: while stock has appeared at the official outlets several times since the Pi Zero launched, it has immediately sold out again – making the device difficult to get hold of and leaving the market rife with sandbaggers flogging the £4 device for anything up to £50 on auction sites. My recommendation: be patient, keep an eye out the official outlets, and don’t reward the sandbaggers with your custom.

With the Pi Zero in hand, I figured a tutorial would be a logical next step. Perhaps one of the most impressive demonstrations of the new form factor’s flexibility comes in turning it into a true random number generator (TRNG) – at least, what Broadcom claims is a TRNG – for a USB-connected server or PC, improving security for a tenth the cost of the nearest off-the-shelf TRNG. While I used the simple method of attaching a USB-to-TTL serial adapter to the Pi Zero’s GPIO header, it’s even possible to create the same device with a single USB cable for data and power by replacing the stock kernel with one tweaked for USB OTG use – a cost-saving trick for another column, perhaps.

Finally, the CodeBug. I’d been planning on reviewing this for some time, but getting my hands on a sample proved tricky until oomlout was kind enough to loan me a unit from the device’s original crowd-funding campaign. Designed for educational use, and the inspiration for the BBC’s much-delayed micro:bit, the CodeBug is a microcontroller with on-board inputs and outputs and a built-in battery connector. Programmed using a modified version of the block-based Scratch language, it’s a great tool for teaching basic computer concepts – and I now have my hands on a few upgrades for the device, which will be appearing in a future issue.

All this, plus a bunch of stuff written by people who aren’t me, can be yours with a trip to any good newsagent, supermarket, or from the comfort of wherever you’re reading this via Zinio and other digital distribution services.