“While the global chip shortage has severely impacted the supply of Raspberry Pi main boards and Zeros', the availability of these brilliant, versatile boards has been almost constant. This has accelerated interest in them, and the focus of the maker community has produced a plethora of interesting and innovative designs around them. Although they are fundamentally a different beastie (a microcontroller rather than a micro-computer), I have found them a better fit for a lot of my projects. The almost instant start time is a real game changer, for instance, I had made a Pi Zero based system to control some large lengths of Neopixels, I used to have to wait for the Pi to start up - then auto-run the program. Now with the Pico based version I power it up and it starts running instantly. Also Loading the OS, is almost instant. I love them, especially now that we have built in wifi.”
