The Daily Hallucination

CAMBRIDGE, England — Raspberry Pi has updated the firmware on its single-board computers so that boards with replaced memory chips will no longer boot, a change hobbyists say marks the first time the world's most famous tinkering platform has told someone to stop tinkering.

"The Raspberry Pi remains the best way to learn how computers work," said a company spokesperson. "And one of the things we would like you to learn is that some parts of them are none of your business."

The company said the change was necessary because some resellers had been buying the cheapest boards, soldering on larger memory chips of uncertain origin, and selling them as more expensive models. According to an internal estimate cited by a person familiar with the matter, 0.4 percent of returned boards had been modified this way, and 100 percent of those returns had been angry.

"I understand why they did it," said Ruairi Castellanos-Petrovic, 44, who has built a weather station, two retro game consoles, and what he described as "a very sincere attempt at a robot" on Raspberry Pi boards since 2013. "I just did not expect the little computer I bought specifically so I could open it up to start checking whether it had been opened up."

The check lives in the board's bootloader, which is closed source, meaning users who want to understand exactly why their computer refuses to start are invited to learn about computing by guessing.

A forum thread on the change has reached 41 pages. Page 38 is a user explaining how to get around it. Page 39 is the same user asking why his board now displays only a single green light.

At press time, a 12-year-old in Leeds had become the first person to successfully swap a board's RAM chip, and had been sent a polite letter.