For Upton, the seed was planted in , during his time as a director of studies at the University of Cambridge in the UK, when he was struck by how few people were applying to study computer science. We'd gone from having about applicants for 80 or 90 places at the turn of the century down to under people. Faced with such disinterest, Upton asked 'Where did those applicants go? It's a very conscious attempt to reboot the sort of machines that were available when I was a child.
To the average modern computer user, the BBC Micro would seem hugely intimidating: A brown slab of a machine that booted to a simple flashing cursor, with no on-screen explanation as to what to do next. But for Upton and many children of the s, that blinking cursor on an almost empty screen was an invitation to fill in the blanks, to start typing the BASIC programming language that made the BBC Micro come alive with sound and color.
Fast-forward 20 years, however, and the dominant computers--games consoles and later tablets and smartphones--no longer offered an invitation to create, but rather to consume. Upton recalls a bonfire party in where an year-old boy told him he wanted to be an electrical engineer, and his disappointment at realizing the boy didn't have access to a computer he could program on. He said, 'I've got a Nintendo Wii'. And there was just that awful feeling about there being a kid who was excited, a kid who was showing concrete interest in our profession, and who didn't have access to a programmable computer, a computer of any sort.
He just had a games console. At this time Upton was working as a system-on-a-chip architect at chip designer Broadcom, and realized he had the skills to try to halt this drift away from computers that encouraged users to code. So, the ability to build little computers, and the realization that the lack of little computers was a problem, it came together, and Raspberry Pi was an intersection of those two things," he says.
Download this article as a PDF free registration required. The idea was to create a computer that wasn't just cheap, it was almost disposable, with a price tag so low that kids wouldn't be afraid to carry it with them or to hook the Raspberry Pi up to other hardware and build their own gadgets.
But setting the price so low posed a challenge. His first attempt at a Pi in was a machine so simple, relative to the computer that would be released six years later, that it could be pieced together by hand, using off-the-shelf chips and components and a soldering iron.
With its oversized processors and resistors, the prototype looks like a relic from a bygone age--and, to an extent, it was, replicating the power of the BBC Micro on which Upton cut his teeth in the early s. The first Raspberry Pi prototype, hand-built by Eben Upton in , was a very different machine to the computer that launched in That was what was nice about it, that no subsequent Raspberry Pi has replicated.
Upton didn't take the design further, feeling it wasn't sufficiently powerful or usable. But he didn't lose his drive to find ways to rekindle interest in computer science, and continued to discuss solutions with fellow engineers and academics.
Matters came to a head in , when Upton sat down with University of Cambridge professor Alan Mycroft, electronics engineer Pete Lomas, and several others, and hammered out an overview of a low-cost computer for kids. Lomas is founder of electronic design consultancy Norcott Technologies and designed the printed circuit board PCB layout for the first Pi.
He described that October meeting as the deciding factor in the Raspberry Pi's creation. It just needed that catalytic meeting to make it all happen," Lomas says. Their vision, he says, was to make a machine that offered a window into how computers work--not to ship a tightly shut black box, but instead a bare board where kids could learn each component, could feel the processor getting hot as it worked, and delve into the code for the open-source software running on the board.
While this second prototype was more powerful than his initial hand-built creation, the machine was still not a full-fledged computer like the Raspberry Pi, only running on a Broadcom Graphics Processing Unit GPU and Vector Processing Unit VPU --chips that typically form part of a wider computer system.
Upton describes it as "a lashed-up thing built on top of Broadcom dev boards". While far more powerful than the s machine, the prototype also booted straight into a blinking cursor, which this time ran any Python code typed into it. As for the name Raspberry, on one level there was a desire to following in the fruity tradition of Apple, Apricot Computers, and Acorn ancestor of chip designer Arm and creator of the BBC Micro , but also a tongue-in-cheek reference to the irreverent and scrappy nature of the project at the time.
Early the following year, Upton, Lomas, Mycroft, Elite creator David Braben, and Cambridge University lecturers Jack Lang and Rob Mullins would create the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity focused on giving people worldwide the knowledge and tools needed to create computer software and hardware. Also pictured on the right of the image is Alex Bradbury, then lead Linux developer for the foundation.
But even if the name and foundation had fallen into place, the design of the actual computer was starting to flounder. Upton and Lomas couldn't find a processor that fit their needs for such a low price, and there were all sorts of obstacles to designing the Raspberry Pi. That was when we went into the doldrums of despondency because that just wasn't going to work," says Lomas. There were points where we thought we were crazy, but the thing that drove us was the fact that if we could get there, then we could engage so many more kids," he says.
At the same time, Upton was juggling the responsibilities of a full-time job at Broadcom, completing an MBA, and working on the Raspberry Pi. I was doing other things, and it wasn't at the forefront of my mind," he says.
Progress slowed until early , when an opportunity presented itself to Upton and Lomas in the form of a low-cost chip, designed in Cambridge by his employer Broadcom, which would be the perfect base for their affordable computer. Upton and Lomas took a processor usually found inside electronic appliances and digital signs and reimagined it as a platform for a budget computer. This new chip promised a computer comparable to a high-end machine from the late s -- roughly on par with a MHz Intel Pentium 2.
Crucially, this Arm-based Broadcom BCM system-on-a-chip would allow the Raspberry Pi to be more than just a toy or cut-down gadget.
Thanks to running full Linux-based operating systems, it meant the Raspberry Pi could boot into a windowed desktop that your typical user would recognize as a computer. There was a sense of a triumph, says Lomas, that "Broadcom was producing a chip that had pretty much the features we wanted".
Upton and Lomas had secured a platform for the Raspberry Pi with the necessary "big silicon", such as memory and network controller, and that more importantly was affordable. However, the battle wasn't over, as their insistence on keeping the price down would continue to be a huge rod for the foundation's back. Many computer manufacturer names come from fruits, and Raspberry is not an exception. Eben Upton said it was an allusion to the project nature at this time.
These devices started with a terminal prompt where you needed to type any Python code to do what you want. He made up his mind that the goal of the Raspberry Pi will be to help young students learn programming basics at low cost. This would help schools teach computing and allow students become interested in computer-related jobs.
The foundation introduced Scratch as the first programming language for kids. You can check the Raspberry Pi blog to read stories about the foundation achievements link below.
The main goal has remained the same since the start, but now with a worldwide focus. Here are examples of their success:. You can check this page to learn more about their achievements. Originally, Eben Upton wanted to create two models: A cheaper and B faster. Recently they built the Raspberry Pi Zero smaller. The Raspberry Pi A is not the first model released, they revealed it on February , one year after the B. They got to this price by making choices on hardware components: less USB ports and ram for example.
But the Raspberry Pi 1 A remains interesting with these specifications:. They went directly to the version 3, probably to follow the model B taxonomy. So this was a huge update for this model. As I mentioned earlier, model B was released first to the public. This was not that different from the current computers in the market, but it was 10 times cheaper. It was immediately a success with , sales in the first 6 months. And this was only the beginning of the story. These are more changes in the ability for a Raspberry Pi to run CPU consuming tasks and enjoy the quad cores architecture to run simultaneous tasks.
Then, version 3 of the Raspberry Pi B was born in February This board had the addition of wireless possibilities, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth integrated directly on the main board.
In November , they also released an original new model, the Raspberry Pi You can find all the details in this article on the website , but basically the idea was to sell a plug and play system, hidden into a keyboard. The last model from the Raspberry Pi catalog is the Pi Zero you can find all the details on my page about it.
The main event was the size of the board, but it comes with these specifications:. It is pretty close to the Raspberry Pi B model in You could find the WH version at your favorite reseller. If you plan on using GPIO pins, this version could help you start faster. But if you intend to create projects with a minimal wiggle-room, you can buy the Vilros kit on Amazon. Many computer brands should be jealous of these results. As I said they sold k Raspberry Pi in the first 6 months, 2 million one year later, and they are now close to 20 million devices sold.
To give you an idea, Apple sold 20 million Macs in , which is not that far off, and Raspberry Pi is on a niche market. And for those who are preparing a presentation or just want essential information, here are all the key dates to remember about the Raspberry Pi story :.
We saw the amazing story of Eben Upton and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, starting from 0 to 20 million sales in six years. A typical model looks like the picture above and comes equipped with electronic components and terminals. They are designed to be smaller in size, and they have a lower cost and power consumption by focusing only on the components necessary to function as a PC.
An example of an electronic device using Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi was developed as an educational computer. In recent years, the spread of electronic terminals — such as smartphones and PCs — has enabled young people, more than ever before, to use these devices without first learning about them in school. But few people know how they work or can do their own programming and software development. This is also attributed to the fact that electronics have more advanced capabilities now and more complete products are available, giving people less opportunity to disassemble equipment and create their own hardware and software.
The founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Evan Upton, as well as several others, came up with inexpensive computers that could be easily programmed by children with less risk of costly damage. More and more users are now using these types of computers, not only for education but also for hobby applications such as electronic devices and robots.
The name Raspberry Pi is derived from the fruit pie, raspberry pie. This is because many companies in the computer neighborhood where Raspberry Pi was based used fruit names such as Apple and apricot as names for their companies and products. However, a microcontroller board does not work like Raspberry Pi, which is like a PC.
However, there is some guesswork involved as to which will be easier or more challenging to use. Microcontrollers have jobs that microcontrollers should do, and PCs have jobs that a PC should do. Example of an electronic device using Raspberry Pi. However, learning to use Raspberry Pi is often more of a bit by bit, one on one learning process, and you may not want to bother the other person too much. Here are two things I would recommend: 1 Purchase books and follow along with them 2 Refer to Internet articles and use them as a guide.
However, many of these books are written for people starting from scratch, so the explanation will be very detailed. You may want to utilize user reviews and related products as a guide to help you with your product selection. Learn Electronics with Raspberry Pi. You can then search for the information you need to get a comprehensive explanation from different sources.
For example, you can start with articles about getting started with Raspberry Pi. Easily create things using sensors This article talks about 50 of the most important Raspberry Pi Sensors and Components.
These accessories can be used in projects such as Smart Home home automation , robot kits, weather stations, etc. Easily create things using sensors. Build your own smart speaker with Raspberry Pi!
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