I was under the assumption that Raspberry Pi was a US based company, but I just found out they are European and almost all made in Wales.
It’s probably the most European computer you can buy, with a massive following of enthusiastic developers creating alternatives for all the cloud services we are trying to stop using.
This has confirmed my choice to try and replace the US based cloud services my family and I are currently using.
There’s an annoying meme that Europe doesn’t do tech things and it’s infuriating. The world would be a very different place were it not for companies like Raspberry pi, ARM, Arduino and Prusa.
Unfortunately the press and politicians seem to think it doesn’t count unless the company is headed by a complete arsehole determined to enclose other people’s property.
I was under the assumption that Raspberry Pi was a US based company, but I just found out they are European and almost all made in Wales.
What a weird assumption. The Raspberry Pi was originally conceived as a spiritual successor of the BBC Micro, a tool to teach computer literacy to children. That’s why it’s made by a non-profit foundation and why they go so hard on having good documentation and showcasing projects and whatnot. That’s also how it became such a success and almost a “standard,” setting it apart from being just another random single-board computer.
I guess it’s an indictment of how far the Raspberry Pi Foundation has strayed from its purpose that it’s possible for people to be aware of Raspberry Pi but unaware of that history.
(By the way: ever wonder why they picked ARM for the CPU? At least in part, it’s because it’s British: “ARM” originally stood for “Acorn RISC Machine.”)
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I lost a lot of love for Raspberry Pi over the years, I used to be a huge advocate, I lost faith around the time of the chip shortage when they abandoned hobbyists for commercial customers.
Yeah, same here. It’s unfortunate that even with Raspberry Pi’s fall from grace, it remains the choice because all the other SBCs suck even worse. I’d love for some entity like Pine64 to step up, but while they make noises about being open source the support and follow-through and community just isn’t there compared to Raspberry Pi.
Radxa, lattepanda and orangepi all seem to make pretty interesting boards fwiw, but as you say everything seems to have its issues and I’ve enough projects to be getting on with without learning a new platform. I’ve a couple of projects that will likely demand a pi in the end - but again it’s mostly down to the software/hardware that’s standardized round the pi rather than the specific features of the pi itself.