Welcome to issue 18 of The MagPi - the premier Raspberry Pi magazine for beginners, experts, Pi-fanatics and the merely Pi-curious.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just released the Pi NoiR, an adapted version of their camera with the infra-red filter removed. This month, there's a great article from Andrew Back of RS Components, where he takes you through the steps he used to create a night vision camera to catch critters in his back garden.

Issue 18 introduces you to a great program called PiVision which brings an attractive GUI, allowing you to control the module through its native apps. This month features a very informative article on the Raspberry Pi at CERN and a look at using Scratch with BrickPi.

There is also the first in a series of articles titled ‘Project Curacao’, an environmental monitoring system utilizing the Raspberry Pi which will be hung unattended on a radio tower on the island nation of Curacao. Exotic!

About The MagPi - from The MagPi themselves!

What we make
We produce a magazine with the intent to help and offer advice to users of the Raspberry Pi. This started out as a simple idea on the well known forums, with a few of us getting together and deciding on a loose outline of what we wanted to achieve.

Over time many have joined and left the team, each bringing their own contribution and ideas to the final piece.

If you had asked us six months ago whether we thought the magazine would be half a year down the line, we would not have been sure. We are now able to offer printed copies, competitions, our own branded Raspberry Pi case, and stable mirrors on a website not entirely made in flash.

Where does the money go?
There are certain administrative costs that go toward producing a reliable magazine, and printing magazines is certainly not free. We get a small amount of money from every copy sold – and this, along with donations and advertising revenue, goes towards funding the entire production team. We also hope to be able to offer more competitions, and better product testing.

You can help
Any donation is very gratefully received. However, you don’t have to put money into this to help us along – time is also one of our limiting factors. If you think you can be of any use in the general production, drop us an email.

The future
We had no idea how successful the magazine would be. Give us another six months, and there should be some real progress made. We are forever receiving requests for more formats, and this is definitely something we are looking into. Translations to other languages would be another great step.