The Orpheus Pico came to be one August day when I was packing Sprigs. As I put the bubble-wrapped Raspberry Pi Picos in the packaging to be sent out, I thought to myself, "why are we paying so much for these?"
As is, we're paying about $7 a pop in bulk for a microcontroller with a lot of features and a lot of flaws. I thought I might be able to do better. A lot of research and 2 sleepless nights later, I had designed a prototype.
I pitched it to some friends around HQ and it was a hit - it seemed to be something people actually wanted to use. A couple of meeting later and I got the green light to start work on the project.
As any of the project's followers in #orpheus-pico-bts on the Slack will agree, it wasn't perfectly smooth sailing. The first prototype promptly exploded (swapped polarity on the USB protection!) and the second just wouldn't work (thought I could get away without ordering a stencil!). But as luck would have it, the third time was indeed the charm, and eventually I had in my hands a working prototype, ready for mass production.
You know the story from here - I fixed some visual annoyances, slapped on an SWD port, and sent in the big order. I'm happy to say that as of writing Orpheus Picoes are now available for purchase in the High Seas store!
Big thanks to everyone who helped me out on this project, including but not limited to: