Welcome to issue 17 of The MagPi - the premier Raspberry Pi magazine for beginners, experts, Pi-fanatics and the merely Pi-curious.
As you can see from the cover, issue 17 has gone all robotic! This issue features a great article from the team at Dexter Industries taking a look at their clever kit: the BrickPi. You may recognize the project from Kickstarter and the Foundation site. It is ideal for all levels of user and a great way to get your Raspberry Pi moving. Head over to page 4 for more information.
To add to the Sci-Fi theme, issue 17 includes another article using the Raspberry Pi camera module. This month The MagPi introduces you to creating a program to track eye movements. There is more on NanPy and a great article in the series on the IO expander.
So far The MagPi has featured a multitude of articles which give reference to using WiFi to communicate between peripherals. Are you bored of being confined to your network? In issue 17 The MagPi sets your Raspberry Pi free! Matthew Hollingworth looks at the ability for the Raspberry Pi to send and receive messages using radio waves. Team that with the BrickPi and the ability to track eyes and you could have yourself a very exciting project!
Due to its popular demand, there is more this month on XML and a ‘C Cave’ revival, describing unions and dynamic memory allocation. If this isn’t enough, to top it all off there is a Scratch article teaching you how to create a program to fire ballistic missiles!
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.
