Hehehe, time fly. Cool projects you are starting. I am also growing some stuff here in New Zealand...
Running a HIVE node ( @atexoras.witness) in Wellington that is currently still private (in terms of RPC/seed node) but once I move things to an isolated machine (for better performance and because I want to spin up another node later in the year) the intent will be to open up the node publicly so that, at least NZ, around islands and AUS have a very quick RPC node to talk to. It's a huge challenge to talk with most of the nodes in the northern hemisphere, so starting a HIVE node was the best thing I could do.
Wow, that is such a cool thing to do! I look forward to the day when I can switch to your node. I was actually pondering on whether I could start my own HIVE node in the future, maybe running on a Raspberry Pi? I have my projects planned out for the next two years, but maybe in 2024 I could start looking at something like that. Would be an interesting thing to try, actually producing blocks on the blockchain.
I am re-loving the experience. From what I remembered a few years ago, things got so much better. And they keep improving at code level. The main reason for me to go for it was because running a Hive-Engine witness node that needs to gather blocks from HIVE nodes was taking too long against nodes that are physically far away from NZ. Having a local node is blazing faster! The second idea was because having a full history (I am not there yet) node in NZ would allow me to do everything on HIVE via that local node. Instead of broadcasting things across the planet. And if I could support local communities by join effort, then even better (which is the intent).
At the moment it will be tricky... should not be impossible but you need quite a lot of IO (if not using memory to run the memory file that is around 20/21GB ish) and to be honest I never tried a Raspberry Pi for IO intensive things... so I have not experience on recommending it.
You would need to compile the source code because I don't think anyone did it yet... for ARM... mostly is C++ code.
But if you give it a go, let me know and I can help with the experience. You will need at least 500GB disk... and NVMe or very fast SSD, otherwise it will take a couple of weeks to replay the blockchain, depending on the IO performance of the disk.
Sounds interesting, indeed. At present my homelab
raspi uses USB3.0 HDD's (spinning rust) and not SSD's as yet, but in the future I plan to migrate my 
raspi home server to SSD drives, and in a RAID5 enclosure. I'm retired and a sickness beneficiary, so I can't afford to do this all at once, but it is my intention to have a few 
raspi's running here at home eventually.
You can order a https://platinum.crypto.com/r/hz3dzstewl card (will run on SGD currency) and then use it in NZ. Then you can send from Hive-Engine directly to Crypto.com (DOGE for example) and charge the card, and order more raspis =)