MORE ABOUT Raspberry Pi

Sensors are a worthwhile topic to write about: They bring electronics projects in contact with the real world and facilitate all kinds of practical applications. Dogan Ibrahim describes more than 40 projects in this comprehensive book.

With the compliments of the Elektor Labs and Editorial teams, and our best wishes for the new year, here comes another previously unpublished article that's free to download by all registered Elektor e-zine readers. "Free Fresh Articles" are published at two-weekly intervals in the Elektor e-zine, alternating with "Free Back Articles". This time we have a Graphic User Interface (GUI) with touch control that’s remarkable for two things: First, it’s one and the same piece of hardware running happily on at least three popular microcontroller platforms: ESP32, ESP8266, and Raspberry Pi. Second, it employs elements from the LittlevGL library which comes with an MIT licence and produces code for many 16-, 32- and 64-bit microcontrollers.

For your IoT experiments, if you want to connect many wireless sensors to your home automation system for example, you need a long range wireless network with low price. And a gateway nearby. Try the Dragino LoRa/GPS_HAT module together with a RPi. It provides ultra-long range spread spectrum communication and high interference immunity whilst minimising consumption... and costs !

Building a small weather station to take measurements of the main environmental variables could hardly be simpler; grab an off-the-shelf microcontroller board and plug in an expansion board with all the necessary sensors on-board. Choosing an Raspberry Pi (RPi) significantly simplifies the design, add a HAT like the Enviro+ from Pimoroni and you already have all the sensors you need to get the job done.

The pi-top [4] is a robust educational computer intended for makers, and especially young makers better known as children. Based on a Raspberry Pi 4, it is a follow-up to the pi-top [3] Raspberry Pi laptop computer.

Because it is almost impossible to work on the Raspberry Pi, or, for that matter, on Linux in general, without ever needing to enter commands in a terminal, here is a list of frequently used Bash commands.

This is a submission from Distrelec. They have expanded their supplier network by adding Pi Supply, leading creator of accessories for Raspberry Pi. Motivated by an ambition to make technology accessible to everyone, Pi Supply has developed a unique range of electronic accessories designed to enhance the capabilities of Raspberry Pi products.

How do you power a highly reliable LoRa gateway that can be trusted not to trash its SD card and can be remotely located and managed? With this Power over Ethernet (PoE) powered uninterruptible power supply (UPS). A couple of 25-farad supercaps provide enough backup time to cover ten seconds of power outage plus another fifteen seconds to cleanly shut down the Pi if necessary.

A super-cap based Power-over-Etherent Uninterruptable Power Supply for a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and a hungry HAT too.

Small single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are ideal for use as small stand-alone network audio players. With Volumio and other specialized Linux distributions, putting together an audio player is remarkably easy. And as ElektorLabs worker Ton Giesberts shows in this article, you can also use this approach to build a high-end audio player.