Things change, there was a large shift to separate Foundation and Trading, Foundation had a large shift to research.When Eben said "that education market and that enthusiast market are still incredibly important to us" at Embedded World 2024, I thought PiServer would be that kind of thing. See alsoNo, it is not rocket science.Since PiServer is mostly a graphical shell that leverages existing fat-client technology in Linux, it shouldn't take much effort to maintain PiServer as a useful product that develops a community.
Piserver was created in roughly two weeks, back in 2017.
(And that took longer than it should have. Something to do with a certain developer only having prior experience with writing Qt desktop applications and various web technologies. And it being made a requirement that Gtk was used instead.)
More a question wheter or not the organization wants to support this kind of thing.
viewtopic.php?p=2211323#p2211323
Since it would only take a couple days to update PiServer, it's one of those activities where the benefit to teachers who rely on it far outweighs the cost.
As this thread is about new products while PiServer is an old one, maybe it would be better if followups on support were continued in the thread
viewtopic.php?t=368799
where a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator is trying to get the Pi 5 to work.
The UK schools part had a large split in the middlish for teaching educators, I guess as a money timeline ran out.
It quite good that the Foundation tend not to care about the Pi device itself and most education is agnostic to the hardware.
Hence we just don't buy them unless there is an enthusiast or special need, in the schools/colleges. Times have changes, we can't afford 30 to 60 times Pi costs every few years. It's just to costly to use for the curriculum, plus once you have it sorted the tech/support has changed and everything either needs a rewrite (no time for that) or it doesn't work. We're still waiting on sensehat emulation I think, and many of the other things and feature went by and by (E.g. VoiceHAT support, while not made by RP, it was pushed way back when and could still work) so it is not worth it. We see the Lego stuff, but just don't trust it will last. That's been lost.
I know that person in the other thread and he is an enthusiast and doing great things in his school with them. He has the flexibility to do that.
It needs to be stable and supported completely with little changes for the life and a bit of the curriculum.
With Windows it generally just works, even with newer OSs. It's easy.
On an individual view (my own, not the education places I work/worked).. some nice thing coming along, but no new microcontrollers announced or shown.
Should be fun to see than working and what can be made by people.
There does seem to be a big push in India (look at all the staff in RPF there). Africa too, and that's a different education setup to here in the UK.
Statistics: Posted by bensimmo — Sat Apr 13, 2024 9:44 pm