Adafruit is a supplier to the maker community specialising is open-source hardware and software.

Its main business is as a distributor of development boards but it also designs its own design modules and it is these which Mouser will be selling to maker customers around the world.

Adafruit is an important US distributor of Arduino, BeagleBoard and most interesting of all Raspberry Pi.

Mouser also sells Arduino and BeagleBoard embedded development boards. It does not sell Raspberry Pi (that is currently the preserve of rivals Farnell element14 and RS) but this deal with maker specialist Adafruit brings Raspberry Pi tantalisingly close to Mouser.

Mouser has recently been talking up its interest in the maker community. So the deal with Adafruit makes sense.

Adafruit has “maker profile”. It was founded in 2005 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Limor “Ladyada” Fried.

Its products range from DIY electronics kits to more serious open-source hardware, such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

It also has its own products which Mouser will now be selling. These include the FLORA and GEMMA which are embedded modules based on the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) for prototyping wearable devices.

It will also be selling Adafruit’s Wi-Fi add-on board for Arduino Uno, Leonardo/Micro & Mega, called the HUZZAH ESP8266.

Clearly the deal has a definite wall between Mouser and Raspberry Pi. This makes perfect sense for the moment.

But things change. Not least the aspirations of Raspberry Pi Foundation, which are now global.

Of course RS and Farnell are selling Raspberry Pi globally. But as Raspberry Pi’s success and ambition grows adding another global distributor with a strong presence in the US, in particular the maker market, would make sense.

Today Mouser will tell you it has no plans to sell Raspberry Pi.

But today you can buy Adafruit’s COM Raspberry Pi Compute Module on the Mouser website.

So I keep asking myself will it be a logical and sustainable separation in the long term?

With Limor Fried and Adafruit, is Mouser getting one step closer to selling Raspberry Pi?