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.”)
See also:
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.
I’ve thought of self-hosting a website at home on something like a Raspberry Pi but I thought of two problems with that idea:
- I think most ISPs don’t like it if you try to host a website on a domestic internet connection, so maybe they would cancel your contract at some point.
- If somebody out there doesn’t like the website you’re hosting then maybe they would try to attack your home server and therefore your home network, and maybe they would compromise your home network. Maybe it’s just safer to host a website on something like Hetzner.
I don’t know if I’m just worrying too much. Maybe I am.
I’ve been hosting sites oof my home connection for over 15 years.
Webservers and such don’t have any problems so long as you have the bandwidth to support them.
I recommend (no idea on EU alt) a service like Cloudflare as that will boost your overall security / hide your real IP from end users
The big piece that will not work from a residential connection is running a mail server. Thats partly because ISPs try to block them and also because most servers you would send mail to will reject any connections from a residential IP address.
Bunny.net is a good cloudflare alternative