Goodbye Pi. – S-Config

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It was fun; It was real, not sure if it was both.

As weird as this turn may be. We've been selling all of our Raspberry Pis and Raspberry Pi-like clones. Partially because of one of our blogs, where buying thin clients gets you more scalability and near-equal power savings to that of a Pi. But partially because we feel that Raspberry Pi as a company has lost sight of what kind of product they are making as well. This may feel like an article of closure. But as we close one chapter, we open the next with future projects.

Previously, Previously, Previously.

Read onward to continue to diatribe.

First, what is Raspberry Pi?

For those who are completely new or somehow landed on this page as some introduction to the world of ARM processors and Raspberry Pi. Wow. Our condolences, as the search engines must've seriously fucked you.

But we'll try to explain it instead of being an asshat saying to just look at Wikipedia(clearnet):

A friend wanted a Pi; they got the cool acrylic case one we made a while back with grandma's CNC router.

The original concept of the Raspberry Pi was always about 'education' because many computers are closed off from the rest of the world. Tablets, netbooks, Android consoles. All of these devices do not have Input/Output registers for someone who is interested in electronics to toy around with. Gone are the days of the "Heath Kits" for making computers (They're still around; you should check them out! (Clearnet)) where schools/people were handed a box of parts and step-by-step instructions on how to build your own electronics.

This is not accidental.

It's not like society magically stopped giving a shit on its own. Many companies do not want you to know how your electronics work. They want you to be a sheep-like consumer that believes their little black box is magical and you can't possibly understand how it works. More importantly, they exploited the human psyche on the path of least resistance. If it breaks, just buy another in state-planned obsolescence onward into infinity while they make more and more money off of (you guess it) you.

To give an easy example. Picture above is an Original Xbox S Controller manufactured back in 2002 (glad we looked this up; was about to say 2001 but that's when the Duke came out). This also has a microcontroller at its core, where the user presses buttons and sends signals via USB back to a host. This design really has not changed a whole lot from 2001 to 2026. You could easily get an Xbox-to-USB adapter. You could MAKE an Xbox-to-USB plug. If your game controller works and you love your game controller. In a world that gave a shit about the environment, you could plug this very controller into a Windows 11 box or an Xbox One Console, and it should simply detect and bring it online.

But you see, backwards compatibility is counterintuitive to the consumer market. They want you to trash your old controller and get the new shiny controller. They're not above peer pressure and shaming the consumer into buying the newest and greatest thing.

3rd-party controllers from the 8-bit era like the Wico Command Joystick that was originally for the Atari, but worked totally fine on a Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari 8-bit, and ST. But to Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, this is a loss. This is a threat. And thus, you have a gaming industry devoid of standards due to encryption and negligence. They could've still sold their controller. But at least have the option to maintain compatibility so multiplayer games could've been sold better.

Even in the Nintendo controller days with the 'game pad,' they could've established a standard using a series of pulses to equal a value back to the host. This allows for more buttons to be sent at near-real-time. Sega used this; PlayStation 1 used this. Keyboards effectively do this. But you know what? Fuck standards again!

We suppose the average gamer would argue that what their favorite company did was a smart move. It's a fair response really! After all, Nintendo wants customers, not fandoms. Perhaps the gaming industry got what it deserved to the level where it isn't about accessibility but juicing your wallet.

Back to the Pi.

The Raspberry Pi gave back the GPIO, the ability to send electronic pulse signals directly from the CPU to a destination device. Beyond just teaching kids microcontrollers like the Arduino or PICO, the Pi started with a fully bootable computer, the size of a credit card, and gave the education sector the freedom to talk about anything electronic with such a device. From programming, robotics, and even daily driver uses like writing blogs or hosting a small web server. The Raspberry Pi was the de facto Swiss army knife of computing.

Another reason why the Pi was interesting was its price. 1st generation Pis were around $35. So, even if a student committed electronic sin by reversing capacitors or feeding their Pi 12 VDC or 24 VDC, thinking more voltage == more CPU...