The MagPi - Issue 19

Welcome to Issue 19 of The MagPi - the premier Raspberry Pi magazine for beginners, experts, Pi-fanatics and the merely Pi-curious.

Are you bored of having your presents delivered by the post office? If you fancy a change, why not have your own Pi-powered quadcopter air drop them in? Andy Baker begins his series on building this flying machine. In this issue, he covers the parts required, their function, and some of the coding used for lift off.

There's also a great article on OpenELEC, bringing you On Demand TV to your Raspberry Pi so you never have to miss an episode again! Claire Price continues with a fantastic article on Sonic Pi which will have your Raspberry Pi performing sing-alongs.

If you want to be savvy with your heating and electricity bills, without turning the thermostat down, why not cast your eye over an article on environmental monitoring. Alternatively, to warm you up, the MagPi returns to Project Curacao to look at the environmental subsystem used in this remote sensing project.

Finally, if that’s not enough to keep you busy, why not paint an electronic masterpiece with XLoBorg? Andy Wilson looks at scrolling an RSS feed on an LCD via GPIO plus we pay a visit to the Pi Store.

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.