Raspberry Pi Roundup featuring Pi-powered firecrackers, a celebration of 5 years of Pi and a new MagPi

Firecrackers!

Dr Lucy Rogers has put together a great tutorial for those who like their projects smokin’!

She’s taken a Raspberry Pi, some pieces of plastic tubing, some Neopixels, some speakers for the ‘cracking’ sound and an electronic cigarette and created some totally legal fake firecrackers. The total build cost is about £185, but she reckons there are some savings to be made. The whole thing is controlled with her favourite language, Node-RED and you can see the flow on GitHub. The full tutorial is available here and you can see a demo of it working below:

Celebration

Matt Timmons-Brown has cut together a great video of the ‘best bits’ from the past year in celebration of the Raspberry Pi’s fifth birthday. With the Pi passing the 12-million-sales milestone and showing no sign of slowing down, this is a great time to be involved with our favourite single board computer. I think this video is Matt’s best one yet – and at only 3 minutes it’s well worth taking a look and enjoying the funky music and seeing all the projects and snippets.

The MagPi

The latest MagPi is out, delayed slightly past it’s usual publication date to allow for the launch of the Raspberry Pi Zero W. You can see from the cover above some of what is included in this issue. You can buy it online from The Pi Hut or in person from various supermarkets and newsagents. You can also download it for free from the MagPi website.