I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix them: Part 5 | Hacker News Reader

I bought 200 Raspberry Pi Model B’s and I’m going to fix them: Part 5

james.li

121 pointstechscoop_xyz22 comments

One of my many roles in the RPi Foundation, is working with families receiving Raspberry Pi computers as part of the PiDrop program. Every donated computer makes a huge difference to the children receiving them, allowing them to engage in online learning, and it's all thanks to the donations we receive. I only wish we could give out more.

Let’s do. How much do they cost? What fundraising is in place? I can help raise money.

Agreed. This is a project I can get behind. Is there a donation page?

Yeah, please link more info.

I suspect you'd get a lot of interest if you posted more info. I'd be good for at least one Pi, if I knew it was sent to someone who needed it. I grew up with potato computers and was very glad to have them. They're 5x as critical nowadays.

PiDrop is the best hidden program on earth / google.

I also cannot find anything for "Pi Drop" but did find something for RPi Foundation.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/faqs/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

I know nothing about this. I searched for it. I am not associated with it. Please email them or sign up for their newsletter or whatever to confirm. I have not been successful in tracking down anything called a "pi drop" on the above website.

Edit: They do have a Marc Scott listed on their team, fwiw: https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/meet-the-team/

As other people have mentioned, there seems to be No information about "PiDrop" or "Pi Drop" available through either search engines (tried Bing and DuckDuckGo), nor on the RPi Foundation website.

Is it a new program, or ???

I'm probably too late to provide more information but - https://www.raspberrypi.org/education/support-learn-at-home/

If the author is reading this: please link back to the introduction / part 1 where you explain the overall premise, not just to part 4.

https://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/i-bought-200-raspberry-pi-model-...

And please consider auctioning a few without buy-it-now - there's a lot of goodwill here on HN for your project and the charitable cause.

I saw earlier parts before but I have to say, I really like this as a "service" kind of thing. Not only do they rescue dead boards where they hopefully get satisfied customers using them, but the proceeds go to fund more pis for disadvantaged kids? That is just all kinds of awesome.

it's a bad sign for our future that the idea of fixing a broken computer with actual soldering seems shocking. We need more of this.

It’s not just about laziness. Many commercial footprints, developed for power efficiency, low cost, and compact size are nearly impossible to hand solder, so hand solder repair becomes less & less common in a downward spiral.

Few people know how to solder a circuit board anymore. But few people know how to churn butter, dress a hog, write with a fountain pen, or navigate by compass anymore either.

definitely, that's what I meant too! I would not expect every consumer to learn how to do this, I would expect, in a sane world, you would take it to a shop or back to the producer.

It's about the design of the devices, they need to be designed to be repairable affordably. There should be tax or subsidy bonuses/penalties for this.

(The simplest effective way would be to require all manufacturers to take broken or obsolete electronics back at no charge, responsible for repair, recycling, or disposal themselves, so that there is incentive to reduce costs of such).

Is it more important to design the device to be repairable affordably or to be affordably in the first place? At $40 a pop it's hard to justify any repair on those RPis. There are much more valuable devices out there which are less easily repairable.

More important to what or whom? The immediate convenience of the consumer may have a different "more important" than the sustainability of human life on this planet as we drown in discarded $40 electronics and the byproducts of their production, that were "not important" to make non-disposable because it was so convenient to dispose of them.

There's a reason why BGAs are inspected with x-rays, doing this kind of soldering is quite hard

How much is he selling the repaired devices for?

how have they been selling?

Looks brisk for the Bs:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-pi-model-b-x2/274673808...

Not so much for the As:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-pi-model-A/274673810787

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