I'm amazed at the energy and inventiveness of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Almost every time we print one of these magazines, we have something new to talk about. This time we're featuring the new Raspberry Pi B+ model. The B+ adds power and convenience to the beloved Rasp Pi B. One really cool thing about the whole open hardware movement is that it offers such an efficient environment for feedback and refinement – the Foundation reacts to comments from users and, instead of spinning or "pushing back," as many commercial vendors would do, the Raspberry Pi Foundation simply listens carefully without a lot of fanfare and starts working on a solution. As you'll learn in this issue, the B+ board addresses the comments of readers by adding GPIO pins, more USB ports, and other enhancements to enrich and extend your Raspberry Pi hacking experience.

Another cool thing about the Raspberry Pi community is the system of independent vendors operating in the Raspberry Pi space, envisioning and developing add-on devices to take the Pi to new places. We'll show you some exciting devices designed to work with the Raspberry Pi, including a Pi-ready Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), some touch-screen products, and the HDMIPi high-definition monitor.

But of course, we know that many of you read this magazine for the projects, and we have another exciting set of hands-on discovery sessions ready in this issue. You'll learn how to use Raspberry Pi to water your plants and ventilate your greenhouse automatically. We'll bring you another dispatch from the frontier of home automation – in this case, a story of how to integrate the Pi with power outlets that support wireless remote control. Plus, you won't want to miss our article on Hover, an ingenious device that detects movement and lets you talk to your Raspberry Pi through mid-air hand gestures. Other articles describe how to set up an Arduino weather station, build the classic Robots game in Python, and put PHP on your Pi.

All this in one issue? Of course! Open hardware is our specialty. Be our guest for another exciting issue of Raspberry Pi Geek … .