Inside story of the Raspberry Pi
The inside story of the Raspberry Pi
Eben Upton's overwhelming emotion at having co-created a $35 Linux computer that sold in the hundreds of thousands last year is surprise.
The 34-year-old chip architect is genuinely taken aback that demand for the Raspberry Pi proved to be orders of magnitude larger than a small pool of aspiring UK computer engineers.
"We honestly did think we would sell about 1,000, maybe 10,000 in our wildest dreams. We thought we would make a small number and give them out to people who might want to come and read computer science at Cambridge," he told ZDNet.
The first inkling of the fervour the credit card-sized board would create came in May 2011, when the first public outing of the Pi in a BBC video generated some 600,000 views on YouTube.
Upton and his colleagues revised their initial run of boards up to 10,000, thinking that would be more than enough to meet demand.
It wasn't. The 10,000 boards sold out within hours of going on sale in February last year, with an incredible 100,000 boards ordered on that first day.
Today more than 700,000 Raspberry Pi computers have been shipped to modders who are fitting them to robotic drones in the sky and underwater, to hobbyists designing home automation systems, and to wannabe coders looking to build their first programs.
Humble Pi
So what, exactly, is the Raspberry Pi?The Pi is a credit card-sized device and one of the lowest-cost computers available. At first glance it looks nothing like what is generally considered a computer, nothing more than a bare board and ports, but it is perfectly capable.The board is powerful enough to stream 1080p video, browse the web or write documents, and it was designed to be portable enough to carry around without breaking. A number of distros of Linux run on the Raspberry Pi, including ArchLinux, Debian "wheezy" and Raspbian — a Pi-optimised version of Debian.
Raspberry Pi provides OS images for download here. Most are bundled with programming aids such as IDEs and the drag-and-drop programming software Scratch. Programming tools are easily available from the desktop and Upton wants future OS images to boot the board straight into a programming environment.Putting these tools front and centre is designed to inspire tinkering. The Pi is there to encourage a similar taste for experimenting with computers that was inspired by the blinking Basic programming prompt of the Acorn BBC Micro in the 1980s.
There are two versions of the board, the Model A and the Model B. The Model B is on sale through Premier Farnell and RS Components. The Model A will go on sale in the first quarter of this year.
The origin story
Despite engineering one of the unexpected computing success stories of 2012, however, Eben Upton and his colleagues didn't even set out to build a computer.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 mid-2000s. 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.
"The kids [coming to university to study computer science] haven't had the opportunity to do much programming before they come in the door," he said.
"It would have been heartbreaking if it turned out that kids aren't interested" — Eben Upton"You've got to put in your 10,000 hours and it's a lot easier to put in the 10,000 hours if you start when you're 18," he said.
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.
"I think I'd been avoiding testing my hypothesis just in case. We took them into a school a week before we launched and these kids went crazy for them," he said.
"It's been great to see that we had this theory that kids still want to program, and it would have been heartbreaking if it turned out that kids aren't interested."
Upton believes it is the feeling of being able to control a machine that gets kids hooked on programming in the first place.
"It's that sense of power in making a computer do a thing — it's 'I made a cat move'. 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.
Building the boards
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."That would have been fine at 10,000 boards, but there was not a hope in hell that we'd be able to scale that up to build 100,000," he explained.
"We would have struggled in two ways...
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 4,000 boards each day.
"We're not rolling in cash but we do have enough money," he said. Those aims range from lobbying government about IT curriculum reform to attending conferences, preparing teaching materials and setting up programming competitions.
Skills crisis
The reasoning behind the Raspberry Pi wasn't to head off some future IT skills crisis — Upton says the crisis is already here.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."It's an industry with a lot of niches and when I look around at Broadcom there aren't enough guys in their 20s. 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 2011 stood at little over half those advertised in early 2008. 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."If I was besieged at Broadcom with talented applicants, then I would believe that, but I'm inclined to believe this is bullshit," he said.
Sales
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. Outside the UK and US most sales are in Europe. They remain relatively weak in China, India and South America."I think that Britain had the strongest 1980s indigenous computer culture and that a lot of the early Pi adopters are people like me who had a BBC Micro" — Eben Upton"We're strongest in the UK, I think for two reasons," Upton explained. "One, we've had an enormous amount of support from the press and people in general. I also think that Britain had the strongest 1980s 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. One of Upton's favourite mods was a project that attached the Pi to a balloon and sent it to "near-space", about 30km up where there is just one percent atmosphere and temperatures drop to -50°C.
"I'm a real space cadet. I love those pictures that he gets from 40km up with the blackness of space," he said.
Business interest
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.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."Industrial computers typically cost a few hundred dollars and they're typically much less good than the Pi," Upton said, adding the Pi provided a low-cost computing alternative for these niche applications."There are lots of little industrial verticals. 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 100,000 and 200,000 units a month, for another year.
"There's always the concern that it might tail off. [But] I think there's enough demographics and enough geographies that we haven't hit yet that we can keep going for a bit," he said.
Summary: The $35 Linux Raspberry Pi computer has sparked a coding revolution. Here's the inside story of the Pi, from its inspiration and development to plans for its future.
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