The MagPi

This is an important issue! This month: Pico 2 and its RP2350 microcontroller are our cover stars. The new RP2350 chip offers us an incredible way to learn the fundamentals of computing. And we can apply these engineering skills to the real world. RP2350 is faster, more secure, and has both ARM and RISC-V cores inside. Andrew has written a great feature with interviews with the engineering team: read it on page 40. Elsewhere, companies have been quick to adopt RP2350 and it's now inside dozens of devices. Rob has a round-up of all the RP2350 kit on page 92. The MagPi is bigger than ever, and now includes projects and tutorials from HackSpace magazine: I talk about this more on page 130. With The MagPi including HackSpace we've got…

At the start of August, we announced the launch of Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (magpi.cc/pico2), our second-generation microcontroller board. It's built on RP2350: a new high-performance, secure microcontroller designed right here at Raspberry Pi. With a higher core clock speed, twice the memory, more powerful Arm cores, new security features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature uplift, while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Pico series. Pico 2 is on sale now, priced at $5. The engineer's microcontroller Back in January 2021, we surprised everyone with the launch of the original Pico, and our RP2040 microcontroller (magpi.cc/rp2040). In the three and a half years since, we've sold nearly four million units of Pico and its wirelessenabled sibling Pico W. RP2040…

We love Google Pigweed! Pigweed is an open-source project launched by Google in 2020 (magpi.cc/pigweed). We love it because it helps programmers and teams of developers build great software for embedded devices that use microcontrollers like our new RP2350 and its predecessor, RP2040 (magpi.cc/rp2040). We are also partial to funny product names around here; we are thrilled that our Pico W has gone down in the community's vernacular as the “pi cow”. We've been working with the Pigweed team for almost a year now, and last month they upstreamed support for build and testing environment Bazel into our Pico SDK, and will continue to maintain it. Bazel is an important part of the Pigweed project, and the team believes it's going to be the future of embedded software development, making…

Our recent release of the Raspberry Pi AI Kit (magpi.cc/aikit) got quite a bit of attention from the community. At launch, we provided a number of computer vision-based AI demos and examples (magpi.cc/aikitdemos), built on well known state-of-the-art neural network models. However, our power users quickly asked for more – in particular the ability to re-train these models with their own datasets, or even to compile custom models to run on the Hailo AI accelerator. Hailo has been working hard behind the scenes, and we are excited to announce the release of the Hailo Dataflow Compiler (DFC) (magpi.cc/hailodfc). The DFC will allow our users to extend the ability of the Raspberry Pi AI Kit and fine-tune its performance for their specific use cases. Everything is held together securely, so it's…

Arm's Common Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS, magpi.cc/cmsis) initiative aims to standardise device support across many different vendors’ Cortex-M-based microcontrollers, and to provide simple software interfaces to the processor and its peripherals. Arm's Windowsbased μVision development environment uses CMSIS “pack” files to understand how to build and debug code on a given microcontroller. To better integrate with the Arm ecosystem, we're releasing a new CMSIS Device Family Pack (DFP) with support for Raspberry Pi Pico and Raspberry Pi Pico W. With this new DFP, you can now use these boards seamlessly with all of Arm's CMSIS tools, including µVision. Our DFP includes the following: • header files, startup code, and other support files • software packages providing devicespecific functionality Instructions To get started with the pack, download the latest version…

MAKER Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather are “mid-career tech workers” who “just wanted to have fun with technology again”. poetry.camera As endorsements go, an accolade from none other than Susan Kare, designer of Apple's desktop icons, is about as epic as it gets. “I truly the Poetry Camera, and imagine that any artist or writer would feel the same way. It's such a positive, creative use of AI.” Take a photo with Poetry Camera and, rather than producing an image, it prints out a poem based on what it captured. You can adjust the poem type with a knob – ranging from sonnets and haikus to alliteration poems,” explain its creators Kelin Carolyn Zhang and Ryan Mather of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and Camera Module 3-based gadget. Kelin's…