August MagPi is out now with Karl-Ludwig's second installment on electronic measurement with BitScope Micro.

There's also a great wrap on Raspberry Pi B+ by Aaron Shaw.

As we said on Friday we love the new Raspberri Pi because it's fully compatible with the older models while offering so much more. For BitScope the biggest benefits are the four USB ports and the ability to source enough USB power run up to four BitScopes at once.

HAT tip to Raspberry Pi!

The latest surprise from the Pi team, covered briefly in this issue, is the Raspberry Pi HAT, or "hardware on top" specification.

Now this is an interesting and very welcome development!

HATs are like Arduino shields in the sense they define a standard for hardware and electrical connectivity for accessories and add-on boards designed for Raspberry Pi B+. The HAT specification has been cleverly designed to be backward compatible with existing Pi peripherals but that's not the best of it. It also defines two dedicated signals (ID_SD & ID_SC) on the GPIO header reserved for an I2C EEPROM which defines configuration information for the attached hardware.

Just like USB, PCI and SCSI before it, it means peripheral manufacturers can tell Linux on the Pi how they are to be configured and used. We'll certainly be taking a very close look at this new development and for anyone considering building a HAT, we're sure you will find BitScope Micro an invaluable development and diagnostic tool!

Learning BitScope Micro

Which brings us to BitScope Micro and Karl-Ludwig's second installment in his series about how to get the best from BitScope and Raspberry Pi. In this issue you'll learn how make simple voltage measurements and check if a NE555 timer circuit is working correctly.

There's more coming in future issues and if you're very new to all this we recommend you read the first installment in July's MagPi issue before this one. BitScope Micro is available from Butte Verlag, Pimoroni, Pi-Shop or on special at the moment at Pi Supply. Of course it's also available for world-wide delivery directly from us. Stay tuned for more news about BitScope Micro and BS10 and some great new open source Python software we have coming for it soon!