The MagPi - Issue 22

Welcome to Issue 22 of The MagPi - the premier Raspberry Pi magazine for beginners, experts, Pi-fanatics and the merely Pi-curious.

Issue 22 kicks off with an article on solar tracking. Nathan and Nicholas introduce their amazing project, the ‘Reflective Solar Tracker’, a solar cell with the brains of a Raspberry Pi, capable of chasing the sun to improve energy capture by up to 140%!

Andy Baker returns following his successful quad-copter series and this time he is featuring his intelligent night light. Andy describes building this project to reassure his son at night and banish those ‘under-bed monsters’. It’s a great mix of both the PiBow case and PiGlow add on-board.

Following its recent success on Kickstarter, this issue examines the Laika Explorer, a digital Input/Output board for the Raspberry Pi with the genius additions of USB and expansion ports.

The MagPi also welcomes back Richard Wenner for his second article for the magazine, where he continues his tutorial on using SQL by explaining how to insert and view stored data. Another welcome return is Philip Munts where he describes how to interface the Raspberry Pi to LEGO® Power Function motors. There are also more upcoming Raspberry Pi events from around the world and more book reviews to sink your teeth into.

To finish up, Issue 22 goes out with a bang with three great articles. There is a home automation tutorial on controlling your garage door over the internet, an article that shows you how to remotely program your Raspberry Pi using the superb Wyliodrin platform and, finally, an article that'll show you how to control Input/Output devices using Scratch. What more Raspberry Pi themed goodness could you possibly want?

About The MagPi - from The MagPi themselves!

What we make
We produce a magazine with the intent to help and offer advice to users of the Raspberry Pi. This started out as a simple idea on the well known forums, with a few of us getting together and deciding on a loose outline of what we wanted to achieve.

Over time many have joined and left the team, each bringing their own contribution and ideas to the final piece.

If you had asked us six months ago whether we thought the magazine would be half a year down the line, we would not have been sure. We are now able to offer printed copies, competitions, our own branded Raspberry Pi case, and stable mirrors on a website not entirely made in flash.

Where does the money go?
There are certain administrative costs that go toward producing a reliable magazine, and printing magazines is certainly not free. We get a small amount of money from every copy sold – and this, along with donations and advertising revenue, goes towards funding the entire production team. We also hope to be able to offer more competitions, and better product testing.

You can help
Any donation is very gratefully received. However, you don’t have to put money into this to help us along – time is also one of our limiting factors. If you think you can be of any use in the general production, drop us an email.

The future
We had no idea how successful the magazine would be. Give us another six months, and there should be some real progress made. We are forever receiving requests for more formats, and this is definitely something we are looking into. Translations to other languages would be another great step.