The latest issue of The MagPi is out, and you can get a free PDF. The projects in this issue look like fun!

Build a Raspberry Pi 4 games console. We’ve got the best cases, awesome controllers, and easy to use kit. Also a step-by-step guide to setting up RetroPie OS with Raspberry Pi 4, so you can run classic games. Plus! How to get games legally. Learn Computing & ICT at home. It’s a lot of fun telling computers what to do, but getting started can be intimidating. Here’s a gentle introduction to getting serious with computing. Build a DOS emulation system. Use the powerful DOSBox-X emulator to boot Raspberry Pi to DOS and run anything from Windows 3.11 to classic games Upcycle a vintage radio. Fed up with boring black-box Bluetooth speakers? Hack Raspberry Pi into a vintage radio and give it a new lease of life. Share your keyboard and mouse. Use Barrier to move your mouse seamlessly from Raspberry Pi to the screen of another computer, and control both machines at once. Use an Inky wHAT display with Raspberry Pi. Make a great impression with a fancy e-ink name badge or custom display that subtly shows off your tech skills. Piano-Playing Robot. Discover a robot that can play scales, chords, arpeggios, or totally new musical scores. Singing Toilet. A trip to the washroom need no longer be boring. This musical instrument is played by pulling toilet paper from the roll. Migration Museum. How one museum comes to life when visitors linger near its artefacts. Read the rest

ETA Prime reviewed a Raspberry Pi retro gaming kit that contains a Raspberry Pi 3B+, a case for the Pi, USB gamepad, power supply, 32GB Micro SD with 100+ licensed Atari Games, and an HDMI cable to connect to your television set or computer display. Read the rest

iRaspian is a Linux OS for the Raspberry Pi that looks a lot like the Mac OS X operating system. It also comes with Mac OS 9.2 and Windows 95 emulators. Read the rest

The RetroFlag GPi Case, which uses a Raspberry Pi Zero, looks very nice. In this video, MakeUseOf gives it a 9/10 score.

If the idea of making retro game players using Raspberry Pis appeals to you, I invite you to check out  a book I co-wrote this year, called Raspberry Pi Retro Gaming: Build Consoles and Arcade Cabinets to Play Your Favorite Classic Games.

Read the rest

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently introduced a low-cost  7-inch touchscreen display for the Pi (compatible with all models expect the Pi 1). It's a great display for retro-games and other projects. Here's a quick review from ETA Prime. Read the rest

I love this strange and wonderful project on Hackaday.io. It is digital clock which uses a ring of 60 NeoPixels in a 3D printed flying saucer and 12 lights on the inner ring to indicate the hours. It also does backups. And light shows. All it needs is a cow being sucked up into it.

At the end of November 2019 my trusty old iomega StorCenter NAS (Network Attached Storage) started behaving eratically and would keep disappearing from the network and locking up every few hours. I immediately made sure I had several copies of the data and started the search for a replacement. But it dawned on me that whatever I would buy would ultimately go the same way: unsupported and unfixable.

So, with the new Raspberry Pi 4 having USB3 ports and a long running desire to make a circular neopixel clock at some point, it dawned on me that there are two devices that run 24 hours a day: my NAS and my trusty old Tix clock that I bought several years ago.

Why settle for another boring NAS when I can make the ultimate NAS come Clock combination? So began the flying saucer clock project...

So, how does it tell time?

The inner ring of the saucer contains 12 LEDs behind diffusers made from a ring of transparent PLA with black PLA colour separators, which are lit according to the current hours. The minutes and seconds are shown on the outer 60 LED ring. This also displays the hour as a series of 5 LEDs lit blue and also hour markers shown at spacing of every 5.

Read the rest

In this video from Pi My Life Up you'll learn how to install and use software called RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi. RetroPie lets you emulate a bunch of different game platforms, like Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, and so on.

By the way, I co-wrote a book with Ryan Bates called Raspberry Pi Retro Gaming: Build Consoles and Arcade Cabinets to Play Your Favorite Classic Games, which has instructions for building a tabletop arcade machine. Read the rest

This is the lowest price I've seen for a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ single board computer. It has a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet. These Pis are great for playing retro video games (emulators for almost every game platform from the 80s and 90s you can think of are available). This Amazon deal is 16% claimed so far. Once it's fully claimed the price will go back up. Read the rest

The fourth incarnation of the wonderful Raspberry Pi is upon us. A faster quard-core CPU, up to 4GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet and dual HDMI outputs are the upgrades; there's USB-C too, but just for power. The CPU boost is a big deal, say early users, but dual-4k displays and 4x the RAM bring it squarely into the realm of everyday desktop computing. Still $35; the 4GB model is $55.

Seriously look at this. True Gigabit Ethernet speed on Raspberry Pi 4.

Raspberry Pi 3B: 94MB/sRaspberry Pi 3B+: 285MB/sRaspberry Pi 4B: 930MB/s pic.twitter.com/WWWIFcDpoV

— Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) June 24, 2019

Raspberry Pi 4 is here! A tiny, dual-display desktop computer, with three RAM variants to choose from, and all the hackability you know and love. On sale now from the familiar price of $35: https://t.co/d9iwVidexm #RaspberryPi4 pic.twitter.com/4fll4gx1Ax

— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) June 24, 2019

Raspberry Pi 4 is here! Set mine up and here it is, streaming iPlayer pic.twitter.com/FXm4yOFVSF

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) June 24, 2019

Read the rest

Christian Cawley listicled 10 old devices upcycled to house a Raspberry Pi (including the Tomy toy dashboard OutRun previously at BB).

Embedded above is a Pi, with a wee LCD monitor, embedded in a 1975 mini TV by Martin Mander. Perfection!

This is a Hitachi I-89-311 portable TV that I've converted into a retro wall-mounted information station! It displays useful content in a series of full-screen Chrome tabs, and turning the TV's tuning dial switches between the pages. The volume button controls scrolling, the on-off button refreshes the page, and the TV has a PIR motion sensor so it turns off when you walk away.

Read the rest

This post was sponsored by Glowforge. Click here to get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro.

This is the second of two videos on how to make a Raspberry Pi based tabletop retro-video game arcade machine. (Here's the first.)

Once we bought the components and made sure everything worked it was time to design and cut the cabinet.

Any graphics program will work with the Glowforge. You can even use a hand-drawn image because the Glowforge has a built-in camera that scans your drawings and converts them to cutting, scoring, and engraving lines.

Cutting

Once we had a design we liked, we uploaded it to the Glowforge app. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping the image file onto the page, then placing the design on the photo of the material You can move the images around the material in order to fit multiple components onto the same piece of stock.

The first prototype we made had sharp corners, and they poked into our palms when we used the buttons and joystick. So for our second design, we used a living hinge, which is a cool way to bend wood. With these kinds of hinges, you can make beautiful and functional things.

Customization

The Glowforge not only cuts material, it also engraves designs - even photos - in high resolution. We engraved one of our favorite characters  -- Q*Bert, the famous cussing cube-hopper. And my daughter and I took a cue from the original Macintosh team and engraved our names on the inside of the cabinet. Read the rest

[This post is sponsored by Glowforge. To get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro use the link glowforge.com/boingboing.]

My 15-year-old daughter and I love retro video games. We often go a retro video game arcade in Pasadena, California, and we also play a lot of computer games from the 1980s and 1990s. We thought it would be fun to build a dedicated machine at home that we could use to play these retro games.

After a bit of online searching, we found out it’s easy to use a Raspberry Pi, which is a $35 single board computer the size of a credit card, along with a free Linux based operating system called RetroPie that has emulators for every arcade and console imaginable. We could use a Raspberry Pi and RetroPie to play every arcade game we want. And with our Glowforge laser cutter, we could easily make an arcade cabinet for ourselves as well quickly make them for friends and family.

In this 2-part video series, which was underwritten by our friends at Glowforge, I’m going to show you how we did it.

Parts and Materials

First, we bought all the parts and materials we needed to make the cabinet. We got a Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+, a 32GB MicroSD card, a power supply, a 10-inch HDMI monitor, a set of arcade buttons and a joystick, a pair of speakers, some cables and a box of various machine screws and nuts and standoffs. Read the rest

Love Hultén makes beautiful game devices based on the Raspberry Pi and RertroPie. His latest design, which has a speckly textured finish, is called the Geoboi. Read the rest

I use an Acer 25-inch monitor with my Macbook Pro and like it a lot. This 21-inch model (920 x 1080) is a highly rated sub-100 dollar model, and is perfect for people who want a large monitor for their Raspberry Pi, perhaps to play retro-games. Read the rest

Brett writes, "As a critique of the IoT buzz, I hacked a portable karaoke machine, stuffed a Raspberry Pi in it, connected it to the internet, and installed Docker on it." (tl;dr: he needed a portable CRT for an installation, found one embedded in a thrift-store karaoke machine, and got it wired up to the Raspi on the first try and discovered it made a perfect and delightful casemod). Read the rest

I spent the last few days fighting off a mouse infestation in our RV. So far I've trapped and tossed six of the furry little bastards out on their asses. As I began the search for where they were getting into our rig, yesterday, I got to wondering how much space they can actually squeeze through.

According to this video, I'm doomed. Read the rest

Sure, you worry about your bees, what with colony collapse disorder, but they're hard to count! Read the rest