The latest Raspberry Pi 5 comes with up to 16GB of RAM, but it’s a bit pricey.

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Visiting the Raspberry Pi Physical Store and Prospects of a DAO Project

A British Pride: Raspberry Pi and Its Innovative Uses

In the UK, besides Rolls-Royce engines, London’s financial institutions, Oxford and Cambridge University, and the traditional fish and chips, Raspberry Pi is probably one of the most famous things.

The only physical Raspberry Pi store in the whole UK is located in the Grand Arcane shopping center in Cambridge. Every time I go shopping there with my wife, I always insist on stopping by the store for a look. The store has a purchase limit policy — apparently, each person can buy only one Raspberry Pi per day. I’m not sure if it’s some kind of “scarcity marketing.” A colleague once mentioned that when their team needed to buy several Raspberry Pis, he even asked his girlfriend to help queue up and buy them.

Besides the main Raspberry Pi products, the store also sells some accessories and merchandise, like books and mugs. However, prices there are generally a bit higher than online.

I had heard that the latest Raspberry Pi 5 comes with up to 16GB of RAM. Seeing the price in person this time, the bare board alone costs £115 (not including an SD card, keyboard, mouse, or other accessories). But with 16GB RAM, it’s quite powerful—more than enough to set up a lightweight home server.

ARM-based servers are generally 20% to 60% cheaper than x86 servers and consume less power. The Raspberry Pi itself is very compact—much smaller than it looks in photos—like a tiny box that fits neatly into a corner at home. It’s space-saving, energy-efficient, and quiet, making it an ideal choice for running a home node.

Raspberry Pi has also released two all-in-one models with built-in keyboards, called the 400 and 500, priced around £77 and £110 respectively. These all-in-ones are very convenient, similar to the “Xiao Bawang aka Subor Learning Machine” many of us played with as kids. Just connect a mouse and a monitor, and it’s ready to use—perfect for children’s computer education. In the store, I saw many Raspberry Pis demonstrating Python programming, and some were connected to cameras and other peripherals, showing a wide range of functions.

The official Raspberry Pi operating system is Raspbian (now officially called Raspberry Pi OS). I’m planning to start a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) project to run the STEEM blockchain on Raspberry Pi. This way, we can compile steemd (written in C++) on ARM architecture. Imagine running several compact nodes on a home network—low operating costs, high energy efficiency, and contributing to a more decentralized distributed network. It would be a very interesting experiment.