Without an operating system, any computer – including your Raspberry Pi – is just a dumb lump of sand. Put Raspberry Pi OS on it however, and you’ve got yourself a working system that can handle games, web browsers, emails, programming and everything else we bang on about here all day every day. The latest version of Raspberry Pi OS, codename Trixie, is out now; we strongly recommend you upgrade, and this issue we’ll tell you why.

Everything has a computer in it nowadays, but it wasn’t always thus. One poor device that has had to struggle for over 60 years without an on-board computer is the Baltic, a Norwegian tug-boat built in 1962. Now in its retirement in sunny Italy, it’s been fitted with a navigation computer powered by by Sfera Labs and a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. Read all about it!

With felting wool and the right kind of needle, you can carefully shape loose fabric into whatever shape you choose. This month Nicola King shows you how to make a European Robin; and with the help of a TinyFX microcontroller by Pimoroni, which has at its heart an RP2040 chip, you can add a bit of programming to make your bird sing.

We’ve long been able to emulate old hardware on a Raspberry Pi computer to play retro games. This issue KG Orphanides looks into playing more modern games, using emulation to bring the Steam gaming platform to Raspberry Pi. And if that’s not enough, we’ve a roundup of the best retro gaming hardware around.

Addressable RGB LEDs – aka NeoPixels, aka WS2812Bs – are everywhere in the maker world. But the very thing that makes them so popular – their ease of use – also means that very few people actually know how they work. We’ve gone on a deep dive into the world of NeoPixels, starting from the very basics and building up to more advanced coding so that you’ll understand pretty much all there is to know about these literally brilliant maker toys. All this, and loads more, in Raspberry Pi Official Magazine 159. Buy it now, or subscribe here.