Way back (technologically speaking) in the mists of 2012, Pimoroni Ltd was founded by Jon Williamson and Paul Beech with the modest aims of selling a colourful laser cut acrylic case for a mysterious new credit card sized computer called a ‘Raspberry Pi’.
Over ten years later, we're manufacturing our own electronics products and we've become one of the best known maker suppliers in the UK. We're an official reseller for Raspberry Pi, Adafruit, micro:bit, Sparkfun and many other producers of great loot.
Pimoroni stands for Pirate, Monkey, Robot, Ninja (Pi-Mo-Ro-Ni / 🏴☠️🐒🤖🐱👤). It’s pronounced Pih-mo-row-knee, for obscure reasons that have been lost to history.
We sell our own products plus a carefully curated selection of fine goods that we love, through our famed web store (that's where you are now). Pirates know a thing or two about logistics, so we ship direct to as many countries as we can, but you can also buy our products from over 100 lovely worldwide distributors.
We also have a wholesale store where schools, universities and maker groups can take advantage of tasty bulk purchasing discounts.
We don’t just sell things, we make things too! We have state of the art PCB production lines that we use to make Raspberry Pi, micro:bit and Raspberry Pi Pico add-ons and RP2040-based microcontrollers. We’re still cutting out Pibow cases as well, with our quintet of trusty laser cutters named after Sesame Street characters.
We also make friendly kits to help make it easier for folks to get started building cool stuff, such as Picade (a swish desktop arcade machine) and Trilobot (an intrepid, educational robot).
As well as developing our own products we have worked with universities and the likes of Google, Microsoft, and GitHub to create bespoke products that fulfil their needs, including custom boards for conferences, sensor boards for measuring air quality and more.
Our talented crew are the lifeblood of everything we do! Pimoroni employs forty people with roles spanning engineering, creative, administration, production, shipping, support and logistics (plus occasional light nautical duties). If you want to be a pirate (or a robot, monkey, or ninja), keep an weather eye on our careers page for current vacancies.
Our PCB production lines allow us to manufacture precision electronics quickly and with a high degree of agility. They can be quickly reconfigured for smaller development runs as needed.
In 2020, we upgraded our main Pick and Place machine to a state of the art Europlacer atom3 - the first one in the UK. It can run at five times the speed of our old iineo+ - that’s a lot of boards!
Our production team plugs in and tests every single board we make, with a variety of strange contraptions.
We’re very proud to be an independent manufacturer and part of the long manufacturing heritage in Sheffield(on-Sea), in the north of the UK. There’s a vibrant creative and digital scene that’s developed in the city, and it’s an awesome city to live and work in.
One of the nicer things that happened in 2021 was moving into our (hopefully) forever home at Parkway Drive - our first building with a roof that didn’t leak, a proper sign with a big pirate face on it and plenty of room for all the crew. We’re just round the corner from stalwarts of the Sheffield manufacturing scene, Henderson’s Relish (which is 100% better than Worcestershire sauce).
We try and do small things where we can to try and make the world a bit better.
We absolutely love hearing what you’re up to. @ us on Twitter or drop a post on our forums telling us about your projects! If you need to talk to us about something else, you can send us a message using the form on this page.