The Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer has become a benchmark for low-cost computing being one of the few vendors to actually physically manufacture their product in the UK. The company has experienced a significant and transformative 12 months, marked by its successful IPO, new product launches, and navigation of industry-wide challenges.

With a $180M listing on the London Stock Exchange after the first year the share price is up over 9% from launch, which does beg the question why so many tech companies feel the need to build in China to complete.

The 8G models of the product tend to make very respectable servers for powering applications like WordPress or Ghost, and for powering LAN routers, firewalls, Network Attached Storage etc. They also make pretty good entry level desktop machines and are more than capable of running a full Gnome or KDE desktop and running 1080p playback while supporting dual 4k screens.

To get going, you can pick up a board for ~ £75 and a power supply will cost you another £10 or so, all you need to run initially is an SD card which you can pick up for another tenner.

For a more professional or commercial quality setup, you’ll be needing a case and the ability to run M.2 storage, and of course some M.2 storage. There are many (many) options out there, my personal favourite at the moment is a DeskPi Lite by GeekPi, which is a case with the M.2 electronics included for around £30 then add a Crucial 500Gb M.2 drive for another £32. All in all you’re up and running with a pretty slick machine, manufactured (for the most part) in the UK for under £150.

If you’re interested in more detail, head over to the Forums where you’ll find people who’re already running lots of Raspberry Pi machines.