The Raspberry Pi is a great microcontroller - except for the fact that it boots up like a PC, taking 40 seconds. Which is not how a microcontroller should feel. Two months ago, I discovered pipaOS - a pretty standard Raspbian, but it boots up in less than 10 seconds including wifi connectivity. So the latest version of the PiDP 'firmware' is based on this brilliant little distribution.

On another note, in February I made the 3rd batch of PiDP kits, bringing the total in existence to about 700 now. Yay! Confirms again: in the age of the internet, there's no niche obscure enough not to bother with...

The new design with custom switches has worked very well:

Thanks to Adrian for providing the picture

I will do one more batch of kits in April (hopefully), and then the backlog of kit orders is done. Finally! On to the PiDP-11.