As we have moved into the age of more readily accessible components, I’ve continued my enthusiasm for knowing how things work into the world of Microcontrollers and the whole maker ecosystem. Raspberry PI is the most commonly known brand associated with the field, but there are more and more companies moving into that space. One of my favourite Companies is Pimoroni (Pimoroni stands for Pirate, Monkey, Robot, Ninja (Pi-Mo-Ro-Ni / 🏴‍☠️🐒🤖🐱‍👤)) who not only stock a great range of hardware from Raspberry Pi Foundation, AdaFruit & Arduino. But Pimoroni also develop and build a huge number of custom parts to meet the needs of current and future customers. A Good Project I have had a few of fun projects over the years that I feel has given my maker brain purpose and direction. Always good to be planning something to tickle the maker part of your brain. E-ink family calendar Hooking into a ical file that already contains the families appointments etc, it was easy enough to write the application to connect to the internet, then display the next few in descenting order. Using a Inky Frame 4 from Pimoroni took away alot of the headache with connecting a display to a Processor, with an SD card slot and buttons. Inky Frame 4.0"/figcaption> This took away the need of having to solder components together, assuming you could find all of them and get them shipped. The reason for the E-Ink display is that it only uses power when it refreshes. Now the call to retrieve the ical file does use a little more power, but programming it to not be updating continually was needed, at a bare minimum it can update once a day, obtain the new file, refresh the appointment list. Which is why having the buttons on the front can be useful as, you could force a refresh in the event a button is pressed, and save on a whole bunch of processing that may not be needed. Motion light I spend a month tinkering on a motion detecting light that only illuminates a very small amount. Why you ask, maybe. A lot of motion detection lights on the markey only have an on/off setting. I wanted to be able to start the light slow and if the motion continued then slow increase little more. But keeping the overall level low, even if the cat was to trigger it, I didn't want it to wake everyone for that reason. This was a fun project I got to do some building and testing with a Tinyfx and a Pico board to see different approaches and what can be supported. There pros and cons to each, but the tinyfx board is ideal for a small project like this where you don't want large devices. Audio Player (Work in Progress) It's hard to just get a device to play music or audiobooks on now, that isn't a stripped down Android device or some thing of dubious creation. So I wanted to build something that would satisfy that role, it didnt need to play movies or take voice notes. Starting with the full Raspberry pie it has a lot more power for playing the music, while still retaining the freedom I'm looking for in the project. Pirate Audio: 3W Stereo Amp for Raspberry Pi Excited to see how portable I can make this one.