Cambridge-based hosting company Mythic Beasts — long-time friends of Raspberry Pi people and products — launched a unique service back in 2016: Raspberry Pi hosting, what they call their “Pi Cloud“.
When I developed the first version of piwheels, it made sense to make use of this service to natively compile Python packages on Raspberry Pi hardware. When I’d proved that the idea worked in concept, I knew I needed several Pis to complete the backlog for completion. Mythic were more than happy to provide this, and have effectively sponsored the running of the project ever since. Piwheels has proven how capable their Pi Cloud is – delivering hundreds of millions of downloads from a single Pi. It’s been a great selling point for them.
They later introduced a web API for provisioning and managing Pis in their cloud. I initially used a simple script to help provision Pis as I needed them. I later developed a Python library and CLI providing the full range of features, and gave a talk on it at a Raspberry Pi meetup.
I just finished off a revamp of the library, including using Pydantic, and a new CLI built with Typer.
- The package can be found on PyPI (and piwheels, of course)
- Documentation is on readthedocs
- The source is on GitHub
It’s been a pleasure to use Pydantic to manage data models for the API requests and responses, and to provide an easy way for users to create validated Pi specs. Typer made it easy to create a practical CLI with all the bells and whistles, and no boilerplate. I’ll be giving a workshop at PyCon UK 2025 on data modelling with Pydantic, covering FastAPI and Typer too.