Make Music With Raspberry Pi in Official Raspberry Pi Magazine issue 166

Music production is an esoteric world of chin stroking and arguing over what kind of valve makes the best sound in a guitar amplifier – at least, it can be. Load up on software, bring your friends, and record your latest masterpiece on Raspberry Pi.

We bring news from the world of 3D printing, where an obsolete display technology has been resurrected and added to a Raspberry Pi Pico and some mechanical key switches. Behold the Flapulator, a calculator that’ll give you nostalgia for the sound of railway departure boards updating.

Do you crave novelty in video games? If so, how about this system by Grigor Todorov, which uses AI to generate games on the fly. Never be bored again!

Yet more AI! This time we’re setting up OpenClaw on Raspberry Pi. OpenClaw is an agentic artificial intelligence, so you can point it at applications and files on your machine, tell it what to do, then leave it to get on with things while you do something else, like recite Vogon poetry.

In more hardware-focused goings-on we have the first part of a tutorial series that’ll teach you to build a four-axis foam cutter, controlled by logic on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip. It’s a big build, so make sure you’ve tidied a corner of the shed/garage/workbench before you make a start.

Still with hardware, but this time on a much more accessble scale, is this puppet. It produces sounds and reacts to the motion of the puppeteer, so we might finally get ventriloquism cracked this year.

A maker favourite, LED lighting is a great way to make averything look 100% more makery. It comes in all price ranges, and you can program it however you want, from complex patterns and colours to simple programs that turn on and off. Dive in!

And if you want even more inspiration for your next electronics (or you just want to feel good while beating your old high scores), we’ve rounded up 10 amazing game controllers.

There’s all this and more in issue 166 – buy it here, or subscribe to never miss an issue.