The raspberry pi occupies a really sad place for me. I know so, so many people who were very well intentioned, and bought a raspberry pi for one of their friends or family members. They've heard of "making", and the good associations that it has, and they see things about the raspberry pi, so they go on amazon and buy some pi-kit thing.

SO many of these things end up sitting in boxes or on shelves. The raspberry pi is pretty cool for a very small niche of things, but really the main thing making it interesting is that it's a cheap desktop computer.

If you already have a computer in your house, then you've already got a much, much more powerful version of a raspberry pi.

If you have a friend or family member who is interested in an introduction to software and hardware engineering, or electronics, then they'll be MUCH MUCH better off with one of these: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Shield-Bot-p-1380.html

and an arduino uno.

Please stop buying these raspberry pi kit things unless you have one of the specific use cases (a small desktop computer) in mind. They seem like so much marketing, and in my opinion, they are actually hurting the movement of people learning to program and build hardware devices.