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.