First of all, just in case anyone is interested, I am still alive! I may not have posted on this blog since June 2016 (that's roughly nine years as I write this) but I have still been carrying on with many of the projects which I have discussed on this blog over the years. To bring things up to date, here's some of the things that have happened since my previous post.

• My children have grown up, attended and graduated from university (none of the ones I wrote about visiting, though) and moved on to their adult lives.
• I have spent most of the intervening time working on a PhD at a local university. Yes. it was a Raspberry Pi-based reseearch project. I officially started study on 1 January 2017 but still haven't graduated...
• I had a job for a while as a university lecturer.
• I have had some software development comntracts, mostly working with Javascript / Node.js / Typescript or Go.
• A pandemic swept the world in 2020 and the effects are still being felt today.
• Several of the blogs and websites I mentioned in previous posts have moved or gone away, which means links in old posts may not work any more. In some cases I have taken copies or updated posts to refer to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
• Several new Raspberry Pi versions have been released, including the Raspberry Pi 5 with PCI support, but they are becoming increasingly expensive.
• The Raspberry Pi foundation has released two microcontrollers, both as as bare chips and as Raspberry Pi Pico boards.
• Changes in the world economy mean it's no longer quite so cheap to order random stuff from China.
• The rise of ARM processors in consumer devices has continued. Even Apple has moved away from Intel devices to ARM.
• ... but a new player has emerged in the form of the RISC-V architecture, with microcontrollers and processors available from a wide range of manufacturers at competetive prices.

I also finally gave up on Wordpress as a website platform after it was hacked, infected with spam, or just broke one time too many (and also as a result of my PhD research, but that's a topic for another post).

What you are reading is the new version of this blog, implemented as a fast, hackproof, low-energy, cacheable, static website. I have rescued all the posts, images, and comments from the old Wordpress blog and reconstructed them using the Hugo static site manager. I have made sure to preserve all the post URLs so links from other sites don't break, kept the RSS URL the same in case anyone still has that in a feed reader somewhere (if that's how you found this post, Hi!) and added some cleverness to support comments and allow the site to be searched without needing a Wordpress server running in the background.

If you spot any problems with this site or have any other suggestions, please get in touch or leave a comment here. Thanks.

As for the projects I was working on and discussing in previous posts, most are still going, albeit slowly. More detailled updates in future posts.

The bottom line is that I am still here, the Raspberry Alpha Omega website is still here, and I am still plodding away at my Raspberry Pi projects and other microelectronics stuff. Hopefully there is more to come!