I'm not really interested in the problems that can come with orbital compute. We've seen them listed ad nauseam.

Have we seen any benefits to orbital computing by launching a cluster of raspberry pis to LEO? Surely this isn't an impossible task to test out on a smaller scale?

There isn’t really much benefit to having compute on orbit unless you’re working on VERY specific applications that have such tight latency requirements where you need to process the data immediately as it comes out of the sensor. In which case you just implement the algorithms in ASICs or FPGAs anyways.

There have been NVIDIA Jetsons or better on orbit since at least 2021 and that had no meaningful impact on any actual meaningful compute workloads beyond proof of concept demos.