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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
