piwheels is a mirror of the Python Package Index, providing binary distributions compiled for the Raspberry Pi's Arm architecture.

Package maintainers usually provide wheels compiled for PC/Mac but not for the Arm architecture, so piwheels natively compiles all packages and makes them available to Raspberry Pi users, the regular way, using pip, without any change in behaviour required.

Providing pre-compiled binary wheels saves users time and effort, reducing friction to getting started with Python projects on Raspberry Pi.