Learn how to recreate all of the best projects from HackSpace magazine with the Book of Making 2025, on sale now at £14.

We had so much fun making HackSpace magazine (and we hope you had fun reading it). It’s been a couple of months now since we incorporated HackSpace into a bigger, brighter, better version of The MagPi. While the standalone magazine may have gone from the shelves, it’s still on the immortal internet, where you can download every issue for free. And if that’s not enough to cater for your desire to make semi-useful things out of home electronics, microcontrollers, 3D printers and the like, there’s the Book of Making 2025 to scratch your itch, on sale today in all good bookshops and online from the Raspberry Pi Press store.

Book of Making 2025 distills the essence of HackSpace magazine down to our favourite maker projects. Whether you want to build a rocket or hot air balloon, learn 3D-printed mechanical engineering, or control the world around you with a Raspberry Pi Pico, there’s something for you here.

This book is full of projects perfect for an hour, afternoon, or weekend; be inspired by the amazing community projects you’ll find in its pages and make your own creations using step-by-step guides.

You’ll learn how to:

• Work with microcontrollers and electronic circuits
• Design for 2D and 3D fabrication methods and make them a reality
• Create amazing things with everyday items
• …and loads more!

Hackspaces and makerspaces have exploded in popularity the world over, as more and more people want to make things and learn in the process. Written by makers for makers, this book features a diverse range of projects to sink your teeth into. Grab some duct tape, fire up a microcontroller, ready a 3D printer, and hack the world around you!

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Hey folks, long time no speak! Thankfully I’m returning to the blog to bring tidings of good cheer: the brand new Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2025 is out now! And with three months to spare before Christmas, wink wink, nudge nudge.

Our annual bumper book is lovingly made by us folks from The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, and we’ve got another fantastic edition for you to read.

This is where the fun begins

Every year it’s my job to find the very best community projects, build guides, and essential kit reviews to fit into just 200 pages. It’s a bit of a squeeze but I think there’s something for everyone this year as always.

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 deep dive

A month ago, Pico 2 debuted to the world, and we’re very excited by the possibilities of the extra power it (and the RP2350 microcontroller chip) will bring to future projects. In the book you’ll find an in-depth interview with the engineers behind Pico 2, and all the low-down on what makes it so special.

Let’s begin

As usual we have our quick Starter Guide for those wanting to set up their Raspberry Pi for the first time, or even if you need a refresher. It covers every model of Raspberry Pi, from Pi Zero to Pi 400 and Pi 5, and it’s boiled down the basics of what you need to know. Once you’re done with that, go on a quest with your Raspberry Pi and discover what you can do with it.

What an idea!

Need a bit of inspo for your next build? Not sure whether to use a classic Raspberry Pi computer or a Pico microcontroller board? We have you covered with a whole host of incredibly inspiring projects – from AI-powered fortune tellers and cinema-grade cameras to powered exoskeletons and remote-operated submersibles.

We’ll show you how

If you need more than ideas, we have a series of step-by-step guides for some of the very cool things you can do with a Raspberry Pi. Keen to take photos of the stars? We have you covered. Build your own personal automaton to do your bidding? Gotcha. Want to just sit back and relax with some classic video games or your movie library? Yeah, you can do that too.

There’s tons more to discover inside the book, including hardware reviews and fun arts-and-crafts projects. Buy one today and I personally will smile too!

Grab your copy of The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2025 for just £14 from the Raspberry Pi Press online store.

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We’re excited to announce that our hit retro gaming book Code the Classics Volume I, recently released in a revised edition, is joined by even more vintage gaming goodness! Code the Classics Volume II is out now, featuring five games inspired by video games of the 1980s. This new volume takes you on a tour of the games that inspired their remakes. It also includes code listings and explanations to help you learn how to write games of your own.

If you played computer games back in the 1980s, you may have typed game code into your computer. Back then, computer game listings graced the pages of books from Usborne and magazines like ANALOG Computing and The Micro User. Spend a couple of hours of typing in code, and soon you’d be playing a game you could modify and learn from. A reasonable trade: you’d earn a gaming experience that matched what you could buy from your local computer store. And you’d learn a bit along the way!

Code the Classics Volume II features retro arcade games written by Andrew Gillett, ably assisted by Raspberry Pi co-founder and CEO Eben Upton along with Sean M. Tracey. Dan Malone (famous for his work with The Bitmap Brothers) created the game graphics, and long-time game audio pro Allister Brimble provided the music and sound effects. Simon Brew, David Crookes, and Liz Upton wrote the stories that take you behind the scenes of the creation of the five classic arcade games featured in this book. What’s more, the book opens with a foreword from Dr. David Braben, co-creator of best-selling computer game Elite.

In this new volume, you’ll meet these vintage-inspired games, and learn from their code in between rounds of play:

• Avenger: fly across a scrolling landscape while you save humans from malevolent aliens
• Beat Streets: fight your way through a level, and defeat a notorious crime boss
• Eggzy: collect gems and survive as long as possible before time runs out
• Leading Edge: Race a car on a pseudo-3D race track
• Kinetix: Break bricks with your paddle, and use powerups to avoid various menaces

Code the Classics Volume II features abridged code listings along with detailed explanations of the game logic. Not only that, you can download the source code from our GitHub repo and play all the games yourself. The book is available now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, and will be on sale from various print and electronic bookstores in the coming weeks.

Pay what you want for a bundle of books

What’s more, between now and Saturday 5 October 2024 (at 11 AM Pacific), you can get this and other fantastic books as part of our latest Humble Bundle. Pay what you want for 14 books from Raspberry Pi Press and learn about Raspberry Pi, retro gaming, and Python.

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As affordable as Raspberry Pi Pico is, there are plenty of reasons to want to make your own board based on the chip that powers it, RP2040. We’re releasing a new book today that helps you do just that: Design an RP2040 board with KiCad (by Jo Hinchliffe and Ben Everard). KiCad is an amazing piece of free and open-source software that allows anyone, with some time and effort, to make high-quality PCB designs. Couple this amazing software with numerous PCB fabrication companies and even PCBA services (companies that will make and assemble your PCB designs), and you can go from idea to finished board more quickly than ever.

This book provides a gentle introduction to PCB design using the RP2040 microcontroller chip (the same chip that’s at the heart of Raspberry Pi Pico). You’ll learn the basics of creating schematics and PCB designs in KiCad and learn how to work with component footprints that you create yourself (or get from another source). You’ll find out how to get a PCB design manufactured — and populated with surface-mount components. Before long, you’ll be holding your own board in your hands.

After you use KiCad to design your RP2040 board, this book will show you how to send it off to be manufactured and assembled. You’ll find out about the various materials (or substrates) you can choose for your board, and learn how to pick the right manufacturer. Once you have your board in hand, you’ll also learn what you can do (and make!) with it. Our new book also includes information on designing specialised boards, such as motor drivers and game controllers.

Design an RP2040 board with KiCad is available now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, and will be on sale from various print and electronic bookstores in the coming weeks.

Pay what you want for a bundle of books

What’s more, between now and Saturday, 5 October, 2024 (at 11 AM Pacific), you can get this and other fantastic books as part of our latest Humble Bundle. Pay what you want for 14 books from Raspberry Pi Press and learn about Raspberry Pi, retro gaming, and Python.

The post New book release: Design an RP2040 board with KiCad appeared first on Raspberry Pi.