As part of our drive to introduce Ethereum to the far corners of the world, not to mention demonstrate the potential for embedded blockchain technology (even without light-nodes) I’m happy to announce the roll-out of our “eπ” Ethereum-on-Raspberry Pi programme.

As part of our programme, we’re offering a full-kit for placing a full Ethereum node on the internet to communities around the world. Included in the kit is a Raspberry Pi (version 2), power connector and SD card preloaded with all software required to run an Ethereum Frontier node. The only thing that must be supplied by the applicant is power and internet. Before you ask, no they won’t make a good miner (aside from anything else, they don’t have nearly enough GPU RAM). However, they’ll act as archive nodes, verify and transmit blocks and transactions and generally add to the party atmosphere.

We have quite a few of these to give away so please use our online form. Everyone is welcome to apply but we’re especially looking for schools, universities and communities in the oft-forgotten far reaches of the world.

If you don’t make it in to the programme, but fancy setting up a low-cost node anyway (these devices are around $50 each) then Christoph has helpfully provided a howto, to get you on your way.

In other news, Olympic is whirring away and there still plenty of Ether to be won by people willing to mine or code a few scripts to hammer the network with transactions. I’ve set up an Ether Faucet on Olympic (named as such in the Ethereum name registry), so go ahead and bag yourself a bit of free Ether!