Table of Contents

• My Sweet Board

• Veni, Vedi, Delectavi

• Pi Productoberfest

It’s been a busy few weeks here at Boards HQ! We just shipped Volume 91, our annual Boards Guide, for which I went hands-on with over 130 boards, as well as getting in-depth recommendations from a bunch of my favourite hardware specialists. Next it was off to Maker Faire Bay Area, our 16^th and best ever flagship event. Then back on a plane to Rome to check out the latest from Arduino, ST, DigiKey, and hundreds more. It’s been a real whirlwind, and to cap it off, I arrived back to a huge stack of new hardware waiting to be explored.

My Sweet Board

(adapted from V91)

I love dev boards. I’ve been obsessed with them since my first Arduino Diecimila back in 2007 (the better-known Uno launched in 2010 at Maker Faire New York). Now I spend a gargantuan amount of time exploring every single board I can get my hands on in an attempt to provide valuable insight to you, the reader, in our Toolbox section, on our blog, in this newsletter, at events, and most of all, in our annual Boards Guide. One of the most exciting developments this year is the launch of Raspberry Pi’s second-generation microcontroller silicon in the form of the RP2350, several exempla of which grace our V91 cover. While the Cambridge-based company’s own exemplum, the Pico 2, will likely prove wildly popular, this year’s launch was perhaps most remarkable for its tight coordination with partners, leading to 33 products from 20 other companies launching around the same silicon at the same time. Each manufacturer brought their own twist, from Adafruit’s Feather RP2350 with HSTX output port to enable exciting new I/O possibilities, to the Qwiic-connectable SparkFun RP2350 Pro Micro with 8MB of PSRAM and 16MB of Flash. Seeed’s Xiao RP2350 wins the award for smallest and most cost-effective, while Pimoroni out-Picos the Pi team themselves with their Pico Plus 2, upgrading the reference design with USB-C, 16MB of Flash memory, and 8MB of PSRAM, plus the distinction of being the only dev board we’ve touched that uses the larger RP2350B package. Beyond the Pico 2, we’ve not seen many headline-grabbing flagship dev board releases from maker titans like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, which we’re taking as an opportunity to shine a light on a wider crop of products. We asked some of our favorite makers to share their go-to boards in categories like AI, Education, Wearables, and of course LEDs. And I tried to cram as much as I could about the 100-plus that I personally went hands-on with this year into the space that was left. Let us know how you liked it — as well as what you’d like to see us cover next year!

Veni, Vedi, Delectavi

Rome may not have been built in a day, but we spent an incredible long weekend at the enchanting Gazometro Ostiense in Italy’s capital city, immersing ourselves in Italy’s unique maker culture, as well as thousands of projects. It’s impractical to include even one one-hundredth of them here, but these are some of our favourites:

Istituto Alberghiero Costa Smeralda is primarily known for training hotel and restaurant staff, but lately they’ve been exploring extruded and 3d-printed food. After discovering the ideal texture, they have begun creating all manner of intricate shapes and innovative forms, such as the deconstructed tiramisu shown in the first picture. Cheese, biscuits, and even meat can all be extruded once their appropriate consistency has been determined.

Cardboard sculptures by Sergio Gotti, inspired by the Italo Calvino novel Invisible Cities.

Circuit Canvas electronic layout software by Oyvind Dahl — kind of like Fritzing but web-based, with better schematics and tidier breadboard layouts.  Generates vector art, and you can import Fritzing parts too. Web sharing lets you collaborate on projects or use it for teaching, and you can export to a variety of image formats.

Multimedia artwork Tessellis by Angelo Bonello, music by Francesca Formisanoff. 18 animated LED panels represent animals and abstracts composed of tangram shapes, all arranged in AfterEffects, with pixels driven by MadMapper, and GrandMA console to control strobes and backlighting.

Pi Productoberfest

This month has seen an immense outpouring of new SKUs from Raspberry Pi, including the handy, elegant, case-obviating Bumper, own-brand microSD cards that take full advantage of the Raspberry Pi 5’s improved bus speeds, and an SSD for use with the PCIe 2.0 M.2 HAT+. A new variant of the AI HAT+ offers double the performance, with a stonking 26 TOPS for just $40 more. Not pictured above is the Raspberry Pi AI Camera, which we touched on earlier this month. I’m still unpacking and battling jet lag, but keep an eye on makezine.com and this newsletter for hands-on reviews of all of these and more!

That’s it for this month! I’m going to go catch up on sleep and hopefully figure out what time zone I’m in, but I’d love to hear what you think of our new Boards Guide, as well as any hardware that you’d like to see included next time!

David Groom, jetlagged but dreaming of boards…

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