This #MagPiMonday, we meet two creatives who admire a minimalist aesthetic and enjoy making useful things from ‘older’ technology.

Have you ever just wanted to get away? Vanessa Bradley and Martin Spendiff did, and a decade ago they moved to Switzerland.

After a few years of working in IT for big corporations, they then made another change to photography, with a side of making to go with it.

“We’ve always been early-adopters and interested in getting stuff to do new things that are a touch outside of the originally intended use-case,” the two tell us. “We also benefited from open-source tools when we were using Linux wa(aaaaa)y back in the 1990s, so we are keen to share what we do in case anyone finds it useful.”

When did you first learn about Raspberry Pi?

In 2012, just from being aware of new things in tech. The idea of a single board computer at such a low price was compelling. Since then, they have always been dotted about running various things like Pi-hole, Nextcloud, and RetroPie etc.

Raspberry Pi Pico was a real revelation, as it suddenly made it easy to imagine bits of code living outside of the confines of an operating system that did all sorts of other things.

Where do you get your ideas from? 

Laziness, a refusal to stop using things that do something well, or a sentence that starts with ‘it would be nice if…’. There’s also a thread of nostalgia that runs through a lot of things we end up doing.

What is a favourite thing you’ve made with Raspberry Pi?

The incident light meter, Photon. People occasionally make one and send us photos of them using them to do exotic kinds of photography. An honourable mention has to go to the LED physical progress bar that we made. It’s a super-simple build that uses Google Calendar and a light strip to make something that is really handy to glance at. It’s now an indispensable feature in our studio.

Where can people follow your stuff?

Most things we do end up going into a YouTube video, as well as onto GitHub.

In a very Internet 1.0 way, we also add things to our own ‘blog’ (do people even say ‘blog’ any more?).

The MagPi #127 out NOW!

You can grab the brand-new issue right now from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, WHSmith, and other newsagents, including the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge. You can also get it via our app on Android or iOS. And there’s a free PDF you can download too.

You can also subscribe to the print version of The MagPi. Not only do we deliver it globally, but people who sign up to the twelve-month print subscription get a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico W!