The MagPi - Issue 16

Welcome to issue 16 of The MagPi. The premier Raspberry Pi magazine for beginners, experts, Pi-fanatics and the merely Pi-curious.

It’s back... Skutter returns to the pages of The MagPi and this time it’s more sensitive! Stephen takes you in detail through expanding the number of inputs and outputs which can be controlled from your Raspberry Pi using I2C. This will allow you to add more sensors to your bot while driving the base unit.

In this issue we have some great hardware projects like Jorge’s PATOSS for monitoring his injured bird and we learn how to scroll text on the Pi Matrix.

We have more on connecting your Raspberry Pi to an Arduino in Tony’s great article on driving a liquid crystal display plus an amazing look into connecting your Raspberry Pi to Logi-Pi by Michael Jones.

After all that, we supplement the above with some fantastic software articles.

We are pleased to provide more on programming in Java by looking at control flow sentences, numbers, strings and booleans with Vladimir. For the cherry on the cake we have more from Bash gaffer tape and building and parsing XML in Python.

Hope you enjoy the biggest issue of The MagPi to date! -Ash Stone

About The MagPi

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.