EEWebPULSE_2013_i0106.pdf

Eben Upton

Founder of the

Raspberry Pi Foundation

Electrical Engineering Community

CONTENTS

Bringing your

PULSE

concepts to reality

Eben Upton

THE RASPBERRY PI FOUNDATION

A conversation about how this affordable,

credit card-sized computer is changing the

way we educate.

is as easy as...

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INTERVIEW

PULSE

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is the brainchild of Eben Upton and his

colleagues at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The foundation is

a non-profit that aimed to produce a remarkably inexpensive, credit

card-sized computer--the Raspberry Pi. This computer’s simplicity

allows it to be a great teaching tool for children and hobbyists alike

and is powerful enough to be featured in industrial applications and

personal projects. Since its initial release, the Raspberry Pi has taken

the computing industry by storm, selling millions of units in its first

year. Countless blogs, magazines, and videos have been created to

showcase Raspberry Pi projects, potential applications, and computer

science lesson plans.

We spoke with Eben Upton about the inspiration behind the

Raspberry Pi, some of his favorite projects using the Pi, and the

computer’s revolutionary impact on computer

science education.

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INTERVIEW

PULSE

Could you talk about the inspiration for

creating the Raspberry Pi?

education side of it. On the education side, we

do some outreach, we sponsor the creation

of course material, and we do a little bit of

lobbying trying to convince the government

that there’s a problem with education. It’s a

very interesting mixture. It actually feels very

much like a commercial company, but all of

the returns are put back into this charity.

My colleagues from Cambridge and I had this

idea that we should try to make a computer that

we can give to children so that they can learn

to program in the same way that we learned

how in the 1980s.

Did the foudation come about from the

initial success of the board, or did you

have the idea to start the foundation

from the very beginning?

We wanted to produce different models of

computers, which are reference to the BBC

Micro, one of the successful computers here in

the UK. The BBC Micro had a conigured Model

A, which was an entry-level device and a Model

B, which was a full-featured device. We kind of

adopted that idea. We initially had the idea of

making a $25 computer, but we realized that

we could do a much more fully featured device

for $35. What we developed was a device with

a minimal version of it for $25 and a “deluxe”

version of it for $35, which is where we got Model

A and Model B from. We shipped the Model B

exclusively for the irst year and the Model A

kind of rolled in in February of this year.

The Foundation has been in existence since

2008. One way you could tell which order

they came in is the name of the Foundation

and product—the Raspberry Pi—is kind of an

obsolete name. The “Pi” part of Raspberry Pi is

the “Py” in Python. 2008 is the point where we

incorporated the foundation and we thought

we could build a device that would just run on

Python, or a Python equivalent. The foundation

didn’t just predate the board, it predates the

entire concept of this being a Linux box.

“$25 is just our notion of

the price of a textbook.”

What is the Raspberry Pi Foundation?

What are some of the main differences

between the Model A and the Model B?

We are UK registered charity. We are kind

of an unusual charity in that we don’t really

accept donations. However, we have received

some donations from high-level companies like

Google, but those are kind of a rarity. By and

large, we trade. Our main source of money is

the proits we get from selling Raspberry Pis.

The Foundation has a board of trustees and

it’s ultimately responsible for—on the trading

side—the branding and the marketing as

well as hardware designs that reine the core

device itself. They are also in charge of things

like the camera board, which is a peripheral.

The Foundation has a bit that makes the money

and a bit that spends the money, which is the

The Model A only has one USB, no Ethernet,

and 256 MBs of RAM. The Model B has two USB

ports, Ethernet, and 512 MBs of RAM. This is what

I mean when I say you can do an amazingly

more powerful device for $35 than you can for

$25. The $25 device is way more entry-level that

is geared more towards children, but if you are

looking for the ability to do some programming

and to play videos and games on, then it’s the

Model B you are looking for, which is a popular

choice. We have to chase down to that low

price point, but we just have to acknowledge

that enough is enough at some point.

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INTERVIEW

PULSE

but I think the industrial applications have

to come irst, and then the RTOS support

will follow, rather than expecting the RTOS

vendors to put a lot of investment into this

relatively unproven platform.

Do you have an idea of how many Raspberry Pis have

been sold?

We have sold around 1.3 million units over 15 months,

which is a pretty substantial number. It’s enormously

gratifying to those of us who thought we would

sell 1,000 or 10,000 total. To be selling that kind of

number every day is just nuts.

“All you need is a balloon

and a bit of helium and a Pi.

The skies would be a little

crowded, but every primary

school in the world can

have a space program and

take pictures of the Earth

from near space.”

What have been some of the most

unique projects you’ve seen using the

Raspberry Pi board?

How many people work at the Foundation?

There have been a number of zoology-type

applications. ZSL, the Zoological Society of

London, has just won a half a million-dollar

grant from Google to deploy wildlife tracking

cameras in Africa that are based on the Pi

and the Pi’s camera infrastructure. That’s

a particularly nice one because these are

designed to go out and take pictures at

night and there have been some talks about

getting them to triangulate gunshots. If you

hear a gunshot from a poacher, you can

dispatch to send warnings.

Roughly six. It depends on how you count. On the

Foundation side, we have a couple of people at the

moment, but we are looking to staff that up. On the

business side, we have four or ive people. On both of

those sides there are a lot of contractors. For example,

we have a postdoctoral student that we pay to do some

learning platform stuff for us. At any given time, we’re probably

buying ive peoples worth of contractor resources.

Where do you manufacture the Raspberry Pis?

We manufacture them in the Wales, UK. We started off

manufacturing entirely in China, but we found it was

actually cheaper to manufacture them here in the UK. It’s

interesting, there’s sort of this misperception that offshore

manufacturing is cheap. I think if you’re manufacturing

in staggering volume, then it is cheap. If you need a

modest volume (and by modest, I mean 1 million units),

I think that manufacturing in the West is cheaper.

The one that is still very dear to my heart was

done by someone here the UK. This guy puts

Raspberry Pis into weather balloons and sends

them up to 40Km and takes pictures of the UK

from the edge of space. I like this one from

an educational point of view because every

primary school in the country can afford to

do that. All you need is a balloon and a bit

of helium and a Pi. The skies would be a little

crowded, but every primary school in the

world can have a space program and take

pictures of the Earth from near space.

Was there a lot of thought that went in to try and ind

that price point?

We actually did things in a funny order. First, we developed

the price point, and then we incorporated the foundation,

and then we developed the hardware. It’s a pretty backwards

order when you think about it. $25 is just our notion of the price

of a textbook. What’s the thing that you could ask even the

poorest child to buy as a school textbook? There are children

that are so poor that they can buy a textbook, but there

are few enough of them than the amount that schools can

subsidize those people. It’s essentially an access-driven thing.

We looked at what we could build for $25 and that kind of

pegged our entry-level device and then we did just a little

bit of optimization because people said to us that the irst

thing they were going to do with the Raspberry Pi is plug it

into a hub to get some more USB and plug it into a network

adapter. We tried to igure out if we could add a USB hub

and network adapter within a reasonable additional cost.

We found that we could.

How do you see the Raspberry Pi evolving

over the next few years?

I think we are going to see a lot of work on

software. People keep asking us if we are

going to do another one, but I think the

models we have already are pretty good.

I think there’s a lot of work you can do in

software and if you look at our website, there

are some really nice examples of recent stuff

we’ve done. There have been really signiicant

performance improvements in the applications

that people care about, simply through attention

to detail. The nice thing about doing that is that you

don’t often follow the people who’ve invested in

your platform. I want people to continue to beneit

off of the software that we’re doing. At least, for the

foreseeable future, we’re going to see a lot more focus

on software than hardware. ■

People are also using these as a Lego piece

to build their own things on top of. In our core

education market, you envision people using

these as computers, but I think a lot of the

industrial and embedded types of things are

about using them as a building block. We

want to be able to support that.

Do you see a lot of people using the Pi

in commercial applications?

Could you talk about some of the operating systems

that are supported?

We see a number of people using them

basically as industrial computers. There’s

a lot of industrial applications where those

are embedded inside a product or just a

computer that that can talk to a display,

sensors, or actuators in a machine. There a lots

of little industrial computers that serve those

niches, but the thing is, the Pi is better than

almost all of those. I think this is a nascent thing

that will take off in the near future.

The Pi can run on Linux as well as a number of variants of BSD.

There have been some efforts to develop there. We also run

RISC OS, which was the original ARM operating system from

Acorn in the UK back in the 1980s.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions like, “To what extent does a Pi

make a good industrial computer?” It’ll be interesting to see.

We have seen people putting them into industrial applications,

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