MORE ABOUT Raspberry Pi

At last, the new Raspberry Pi 4 hardware has arrived. The last time new hardware arrived the steps forward were modest if not small. From Raspberry Pi 2 to Raspberry Pi 3 was a nice step forward, but from 3 B to 3 B+, to be honest, was more a facelift than a real step. Over time, after the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, competitors appeared with more powerful and feature-rich hardware like USB 3.0 and native Ethernet, just to name a few improvements.

Do you intend to work on a Raspberry Pi project with a camera? Then this book will get you going for sure. In this book about camera projects, Dogan Ibrahim shows you how you can do this step-by-step . From a simple photo with a selfie stick, or the construction of a wildlife camera, right up to the complex process of licence plate recognition.

The word LiDAR, the ‘Li’ meaning ‘light’ indicates a device for optoelectronic echolocation. Instead of radio frequencies, the Lidar transmits a pulsed laser beam, the echo of which allows the determination of the distance of a reflecting obstacle. There is much talk these days of self-driving cars. Cheap Lidars with interesting characteristics are now available to anyone; they permit rapid development beyond the experimental stage.

Elektor software developer and lab worker Mathias Claußen was tasked to develop a control for the FM radio on the Raspberry Pi [1] using a touch screen. The platform-independent (GUI) framework Qt has almost become the go-to industry standard to build such interfaces, so the choice was clear. For any developers out there facing similar challenges, Mathias has put together a manual that shows how set up a cross-compiler environment on a PC to allow you to compile Qt applications for the Raspberry Pi from a PC — he also includes a simple demo of course.

A PiCAN 2 HAT provides your Raspberry Pi with full CAN-Bus capability: CAN v2.0B at 1 Mb/s and high-speed (10 MHz) SPI Interface. It uses the Microchip MCP2515 CAN controller with MCP2551 CAN transceiver. The connection is made via DB9 or through a 3-way screw terminal. The SocketCAN driver is easy to install. To the application, it appears as can0. Programming can be done in Python or C.

The RPi doesn't actually need a push to boost its popularity. Nevertheless, this new way of providing a plug-and-play setup for this platform will substantially widen the circle of friends. Even the timidest beginner will find in it a comfortable environment for programming his own Pi-driven hard- and software. Many programming languages are available. For a start, tinker around with existing ready-to-go projects, and soon you will follow your own ideas.

Language assistants like Alexa, Google Home or Siri are now commonplace. However, the actual recognition of the spoken words is not done locally, but in the cloud of the provider – which raises questions about data privacy. There are other solutions such as Snips – a speech recognition system that runs entirely on local hardware like the RPi. We took a look at a speech recognition kit and show how you can use it to develop your own applications...

Google has, with Coral, launched a new platform of hardware and software tools that lets you develop neural networks locally and without using the cloud.

Mr. Beekhuyzen talks here of his experience, as an expert, with the production of quality digital audio with the S/PDIF DigiOne audio card, a Raspberry Pi HAT offered by the manufacturer Allo. His critique is very well written, very informative and delivered in an intelligible fashion. Another good reason to listen until the end, and appreciate it: he does not forget to put his appreciation in context.

For the cost of 3 Raspberry Pis you will get from Allo, the DigiOne, a HAT for the Raspberry Pi, which makes available a digital S/P-DIF signal from the audio signal playing on the Pi. Is it worth that much?