Saturday morning, no plan, and a Raspberry Pi Pico still sealed in its anti-static bag. That gap is exactly what the Raspberry Pi Book of Making 2027 is built to fill: a stack of weekend-sized builds pulled from a year of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine and printed in one place, so you are not scrolling back issues at 9pm looking for the wiring diagram.
What made the cut
The lineup skips blink-an-LED filler. Origami paper circuits drop an addressable RGB LED and a Pico onto folded paper, so the board is the paper. A ground-up electronics primer sorts out resistor versus capacitor before handing you a circuit to drive from code. There is a first-PCB tutorial that ends in a rain-reminder gadget, an underwater rover cut from PVC pipe and driven by a single motor with a camera bolted on, plus a CO2 monitor, long-range radio links, a scratch-built robot, and a drum machine.
Parts and cost reality
The book ships 18 August 2026 from Raspberry Pi Press at an introductory GBP 9.99, down from the GBP 14 cover, which lands near PHP 750 after shipping. That is under the price of most single dev boards. The projects stay cheap on purpose: the origami lamp wants a Pico, one WS2812-style LED, and three jumper wires. On the rover, the motor and waterproofing eat the budget, not the compute. One gotcha worth flagging before you solder anything: Pico GPIO runs 3.3V logic, so a 5V Arduino sensor sketch ported straight across can read garbage or brick a pin. A level shifter, or a two-resistor divider on the input side, sorts it.
Spend your Sunday on one of them
Pick one project, not five. The origami lamp is a two-hour afternoon if your Pico already has MicroPython flashed. The PCB chapter is the better pick if you want a skill that outlives the weekend, since KiCad practice carries directly into thesis and capstone hardware where a hand-wired breadboard will not survive the demo. Read the full announcement at raspberrypi.com, then grab the ePUB if you want schematics open on the bench. Starting from zero? A Pico W, a breadboard, and a jumper set are on the shelf at Circuit.Rocks.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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