Curious Chip has developed the PIP portable console, a console to teach young people how to program, which mimics the Nintendo Switch and has a Raspberry Pi inside.

The Arduino electronic development board was the first to start the movement of developing low-cost solutions for the development of all kinds of projects. If you are fans of the maker world, surely you have developed something with free hardware, but in this case we will talk about Raspberry Pi, the low-cost board that has been used to develop retro consoles on many occasions, but in this case they have developed a product called PIP, a portable programmable console in the style of Nintendo Switch.

Those who have developed this kind of console for development, it has been created by Curious Chip, which makes use of Compute Module 3 to create the portable console that they have named PIP and that has been developed for programming. It offers an intelligent design adapted to industrial production, developed based on a Raspberry Pi 3 and to which a SO-DIMM RAM module has been incorporated. The design is very similar to the Nintendo Switch, as it has a controller on each side with a Joy-Con arrangement and a touch screen has been integrated.

It has been developed to bring programming closer to young people and will support various programming languages, including Python, C, and HTML. The console also supports peripherals such as keyboard, mouse and monitor, so we can also use it as a laptop. Initially it has been thought of parents, but they also want to take it to educational institutions. Currently there are five functional prototypes of the fifth development process, which already has the board, the touch screen, a battery and the support to put it up. The GPIO connectors are easily accessible on the front panel and cables have been added for the connection and control of the components, as well as 8 programmable RGB LEDs, microphone, speakers or motion sensors.

The project is currently on Kickstarter for just £150; we say "just" because it will cost £200 when it hits the market. Product shipments will begin in late summer 2018, and £33.619 is needed for funding, which will close on December 17th.