The Raspberry Pi Foundation was established with the goal of inspiring the next generation of programmers: it just turned out they felt the best way of doing that was to provide a computer cheap enough for kids and easy enough for them to hack. Upton's passion for nurturing the next generation of coders was born out of the frustration he felt when helping manage undergraduate admissions to study computer science at Cambridge University in the mids.
In the 10 years since he'd studied computer science at the university he said students had gone from arriving with knowledge of several assembly and high-level languages to a working knowledge of HTML, Javascript and maybe a bit of PHP.
Despite Upton's belief that kids are still interested in coding, he was nervous about showing the Pi to young people for the first time, a fear born out of the received wisdom that they are interested in playing with smartphones and social networks but not the underlying technology that makes them work.
We took them into a school a week before we launched and these kids went crazy for them," he said. Upton believes it is the feeling of being able to control a machine that gets kids hooked on programming in the first place. Because the Pi's simple and bare bones if you make it do something, they seem to feel they can own it, more so than making a PC do something," he said.
Meeting demand far in excess of what the Foundation planned for posed a challenge. As the Pi was getting ready to launch, the operation to build and ship the boards — from booking factory time to purchasing the chips — fell to the relatively modest resources of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charitable body initially funded by loans from Upton and five other trustees. With the supply of capital, we wouldn't have had enough money to build them at a high enough rate, and we would have struggled with logistics, with just moving the boxes.
To meet the demand Raspberry Pi struck a deal with major electronics distributors Premier Farnell and RS Components and licensed them to manufacture and distribute the boards.
Partnering with the electronics distributors gave the operation the buying power to keep component prices low and the global distribution network to handle the logistics. Boards were originally made in China but from September last year some of the manufacturing was moved to the Wales.
The Sony factory in Pencoed in South Wales now produces 4, boards each day. The Raspberry Pi is sold at just above cost price, and even though the Foundation is sharing that profit with the two distributors, Upton said it still has enough money to pursue its charitable aims.
Those aims range from lobbying government about IT curriculum reform to attending conferences, preparing teaching materials and setting up programming competitions.
The reasoning behind the Raspberry Pi wasn't to head off some future IT skills crisis — Upton says the crisis is already here. IT skills in What's really in demand? Big data, cloud and good old C are among the skills that employers are looking for this year.
Read More. In his day job Upton is a system-on-a-chip architect at chip designer Broadcom and says he sees firsthand the evidence of the lack of new computer scientists, software engineers and programmers coming out of UK universities. There should be the same ratio of guys in 30s to guys in their 20s, but there are a lot more guys in their 30s.
It's not a dying industry yet but if we carry on, we'll probably fall below a critical mass and we won't be sustainable anymore," he said. The question of whether there is a shortage of computer programmers and engineers in the UK is a contentious one, with figures suggesting its effects are sometimes overstated. The number of advertised IT roles in stood at little over half those advertised in early Some IT skills crisis sceptics say the domestic talent shortage is overblown to justify the offshoring of entry-level roles.
Upton's take is that he sees little evidence that there is software engineering talent going begging in the UK. Sales of the Raspberry Pi board are split about one third in the UK, one third in North America and one third in the rest of the world. They remain relatively weak in China, India and South America. I also think that Britain had the strongest s indigenous computer culture and that a lot of the early adopters are people like me who had a BBC Micro.
Early adopters of the Pi were in general not children with an interest in programming, but men with passion for computing who saw a cool new toy for them to hack. Grown-up tech enthusiasts accounted for about four-fifths of sales at launch according to Upton but the pendulum is now swinging back towards kids, as both parents, teachers and children buy the boards. He estimates that hundreds of UK schools have also picked up the device for use in lessons. The enthusiast community has been busy building the Pi into creations of every shape and size, from self-piloting ships to remote-controlled homes.
I love those pictures that he gets from 40km up with the blackness of space," he said. Businesses are also increasingly finding a use for the diminutive board, and since it became possible to bulk-order the Pi , Premier Farnell has seen an upsurge in large volume orders — those running into hundreds of boards. A look inside the British chip designer, from its origins in a Cambridge barn to its current champagne-marked successes and a future where M2M is key.
Upton said that businesses are buying up the board to use for tasks ranging from automating factory production lines to running consumer media player appliances. None of them on their own are big enough to justify somebody coming in and making something that can address that market. What the Pi has done is to make a multi-tool. Upton believes that demand for the Pi will sit close to its current level, of between , and , units a month, for another year.
Upton warns not to expect any imminent announcements about new versions of the Pi or substantial price changes. Similarly, Raspberry Jams are Raspberry Pi-focused events for people of all ages to come together to learn about Raspberry Pi and share ideas and projects.
The Raspberry Pi operates in the open source ecosystem: it runs Linux a variety of distributions , and its main supported operating system, Pi OS, is open source and runs a suite of open source software. The Raspberry Pi Foundation contributes to the Linux kernel and various other open source projects as well as releasing much of its own software as open source. The Raspberry Pi's schematics are regularly released as documentation, but the board is not open hardware.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation relies on income from the sale of Raspberry Pi units to do its charitable work in the education sector. Some people buy a Raspberry Pi to learn to code, and people who can already code use the Pi to learn to code electronics for physical projects. The Raspberry Pi can open opportunities for you to create your own home automation projects, which is popular among people in the open source community because it puts you in control, rather than using a proprietary closed system.
Also, see these 5 projects for Raspberry Pi at home and 5 great Raspberry Pi projects for the classroom. And finally, don't miss the Top 12 Raspberry Pi stories of What is a Raspberry Pi? The Pi is a Linux computer, so technically it can do anything any Linux computer can do, such as run email and Web servers , act as network storage , or operate as a VPN. But you can find a ton of projects out there made specifically for the Raspberry Pi: You can use it to teach kids how to code , turn it into a DIY gaming console , use it as a media center attached to your TV, build a camera , turn a dumb appliance into a smart one , or even make a modern-day Teddy Ruxpin.
You can even use the Pi to emulate off-the-shelf technology, which is one of my favorite ways to learn how everyday tech works. This is almost never the easiest or most cost-effective option, but it can be a fun way to learn new skills.
You can make your own Alexa-like but privacy-focused voice assistant , a wireless access point , a Chromecast-like device , an AirPlay receiver for streaming music , and even your own cloud file-syncing service. Is it cheaper than buying an Echo Dot? Absolutely not. You just buy the thing, plug it into the Pi, and get to making something cool.
The official Raspberry Pi camera module , for example, lets you add a camera to the Pi and use it as a point-and-shoot or a surveillance camera. The Sense HAT detects speed, orientation, and environmental conditions, which is perfect for a weather station.
That way, you have the basic necessities and you can expand from there. Part of the fun of the Raspberry Pi is customization, and though you have thousands of options for cases, we like either the official case or the colorful Rainbow Pibow. Like any computer, the Raspberry Pi needs an operating system to do stuff. Most machines these days run Windows or macOS, but the Raspberry Pi primarily runs Linux, and you have a lot of options. It includes free software for coding, an office suite, and of course, a special version of Minecraft.
Raspberry Pi OS now even includes an app store to make downloading third-party software easier. Several other specialized operating systems are built around particular projects, like Recalbox for retro games or OSMC for a media center.
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