The "let's hack this into a Beowulf cluster!" stuff was secondary. Now it seems to be primary and the education stuff is, um, not even mentioned anymore?
The outcome couldn’t have been better.
There's a group of guys I build hardware/firmware for. They are experienced engineers, but their expertise is in machine tools.
We met because they made a post on an Arduino forum a few years ago basically saying "we need to do X. We know it has to be possible in a cost-effective way because of all the cheap Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc. hardware we keep seeing for sale but we don't have any experience on those platforms. Can anyone help us?"
This illustrates a point that a lot of people don't see: while Arduino or RPi were released for a specific purpose, the absolutely massive ecosystem that grew up around them enabled a slew of entirely new classes of applications that weren't feasible before due to cost.
Back to "my" guys. If I quoted them an upfront design for what they needed, starting from scratch, it would have reached into the five figures easily. Instead I was able to say "hey, I'm working on something that has a lot in common with that. I'll build you a prototype of what you need for the cost of the hardware" and we went from there. Now that project makes me a few $k per year.
Except at the very top of the website?