In keeping with the foundation's educational mission and commitment to transparency, each board was available with a variety of Linux-based operating systems and a suite of programming tools.
However, the foundation now had a new problem--it was a victim of its own success. Upton and the board's co-creators had started off thinking small for the Raspberry Pi, assuming they'd sell no more than 1, Even after the first public airing of the Raspberry Pi chalked up , YouTube views in just two days, the team behind the board were still cautious.
But the rocketing demand didn't tail off, and the foundation's ability to get boards made was starting to look like it would fall short, with , Raspberry Pis ordered when the board went on sale on February The foundation's model of producing boards in batches of 10, at a time, with sales of one batch funding the manufacture of the next, was too slow to be practicable to meet such demand.
Matters were further complicated by supply-chain considerations, as well as excise and manufacturing costs, which forced the foundation to get the board built in China. Under the deal, Farnell and RS Components take care of the manufacture and distribution of Pi boards, subcontracting the manufacturing out to a third party -- initially out of a factory in China, but since late from a Sony factory in South Wales in the UK.
Looking back, Upton believes this licensing deal was a crucial decision in helping the Raspberry Pi become the success it has been--allowing the foundation to build the Pi in much larger volumes and tap into those companies' global distribution networks.
That was the thing that let us grow," he says. At the beginning of March, with , orders, massive buzz online, and the newfound ability to manufacture boards in bulk, Upton says he began to realize the scale of the Raspberry Pi's appeal.
We went right down to the bottom of the pallet, to a random one in the middle, in case they put the ones that worked up at the top. We plugged that one in and it booted, and then we were like, 'Yeah, this is gonna be a thing'. Then, we thought we might sell half a million units," he says. Since the launch of the Raspberry Pi 1 in , that momentum hasn't let up.
That success has funded an extensive educational outreach program, in teaching more than , children a week about programming via code clubs and educating more than 8. From six people running the show, it has now ballooned into an international organization, with offices in the UK and the US, and a subsidiary organization, Raspberry Pi Trading, to handle the engineering and trading activities.
There is even someone who started out tinkering with the Pi as a schoolboy who now works on the hardware engineering team. For Upton, the proof of the Raspberry Pi's success lies not just in the tens of millions of boards sold, but in its ability to give a new generation the same sense of excitement he felt coding games on the BBC Micro all those years ago.
Years later, those kids are heading to university, and the numbers applying to study computer science at Cambridge are climbing once more. Upton is keen to stress that the Raspberry Pi is not one man's creation, and from the early days has been the product of specialists who've worked on the hardware, software, promotion, case design, and so on. That's truer than ever today. The world isn't like that when you're trying to build something as complicated as a Raspberry Pi," he says.
A case in point is how the foundation built the huge community of Pi owners who regularly help each other and share their projects. That strong sense of community was largely crafted by Liz Upton, today the foundation's director of communications, who in switched from working as a freelance journalist to volunteering for the foundation full-time and who Eben says "invented a lot of the techniques we still use to engage with our community".
Realizing this original vision for the Raspberry Pi was made possible by the computer's success. With more than 2. It will be the biggest challenge since creating the Raspberry Pi 2, and Upton says the ambition is to release the board in the timeframe.
Single-board computers are two-a-penny today, and you can't move for tiny machines masquerading as the Pi--be they banana, orange, or blueberry-flavored. But how different would the world look if the Pi hadn't been created? He speculates that maybe Arduino would have branched out from making microcontroller boards to build a low-cost general-purpose SBC or that BeagleBoards' SBCs would have drifted down to the Raspberry Pi's price.
Perhaps he and the Pi's co-creators simply got lucky. In some respects, it took a level of inexperience to create the Raspberry Pi, Upton says. If he and his colleagues had known more about the challenges they would face, they might never have begun. We didn't know what was impossible, and so we did an impossible thing. The co-creators of the credit-card-sized board reveal the many challenges they overcame to build the breakthrough machine.
There were points where we thought we were crazy. The Raspberry Pi Alpha boards, fresh off the production line in But there was an intense commitment to make it happen.
Don't miss our upcoming, in-depth feature stories. Subscribe to the TechRepublic Cover Stories newsletter. About Nick Heath. Show Comments. Hide Comments. My Profile Log out. Join Discussion. Add your Comment. They conceived that providing easy, low-cost access to a computer could be the solution to the problem. This was then complemented with the launch of a lower cost Model A which had less memory and USB ports.
Even though this PC was so cheap, it could run basic operating systems such as Linux. It quickly gained popularity with consumers as a low-cost PC replacement, but it also invigorated the enthusiasm within the hobbyist scene where users could build devices with the RPi as the core computer.
They have often been used in our DIN Rail mounting enclosures which allow businesses to safely mount the computers while still having access to the various inputs and outputs. We have seen these computers used for a wide variety of uses including monitoring and automation systems.
Take a look at the beta version of dw. We're not done yet! Your opinion can help us make it better. We use cookies to improve our service for you. You can find more information in our data protection declaration. Shift interview with Eben Upton, co-inventor of the Raspberry Pi, about the possibilities the device offers. The mini computer Raspberry Pi is designed to encourage amateur inventors - and it's worked on one and a half million users worldwide.
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