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MagPI Magazine - aiy project

When it comes to technology we tend to be a household of early-ish adopters and one area we've really been exploring recently is home automation. Sonos and Hue feature throughout our rooms and are certainly put through their paces at times - even more so when you factor in our dodgy broadband! I guess it stands to reason really, both my husband and I work in the computing sector, him at an international software house, me, on a smaller scale in a secondary school IT department. Therefore we find it much easier to purchase technology than all those more mundane household expenses we really should be looking into!

So when a colleague of mine reminded me about the MagPi magazine and drew my attention to their home automation edition my interest was piqued!  Even more tantalising was the fact it was out of stock!  We ended up spending a couple of weeks waiting for more to come in and having a mad scramble to order one before they all went again before we finally secured an issue.  It was worth the hassle!

A post shared by Amy Collishaw (@binksbzz) on
The magazine itself is jam packed full of information and ideas about the Raspberry Pi.  It's not your usual geeky magazine either.  The pages were well laid out, the information clear and encouraging to even a novice, without being dull or patronising to those with more experience.  One thing that particularly struck me was how few adverts it contained in a somewhat substantial publication - yes it was £5 to buy but really, for what you got for that it's well worth the money! Unbelievably they also offer a free downloadable version for all on their website!  Having only had a quick scan through at breakfast I'm already excited to try out some of the ideas they presented - got to get me a dash button for one thing!

And then onto the Automation kit.  This is billed as a starter pack for anyone wanting to explore Google's voice recognition and digital assistant services and it certainly meets this target.  The kit contained everything you needed in an easy to assemble form and the magazine gave a step by step tutorial to get you to a finished product.  Whilst the coding side of things is a bit beyond the six year old, the build itself was perfectly accessible, likened much to the Lego instructions he's used to following these days.  It was lovely to see him and daddy follow and help each other create the system.  Daddy completed the tricky install and code setup and then the whole family had much fun trying it all out!

I don't think I can praise this magazine and issue enough right now, it's educational, fun and perfect for our whole little family.  We've already bought the next edition and are definitely looking into subscribing in the near future.

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