Pete Lomas | Raspberry Pi

Happy birthday to us!

Today’s a very special day for us here at Raspberry Pi. It’s the first anniversary of the Pi’s launch day. (It’s as near as we can get; we launched on a leap day last year. We’re going to have a really great party in 2016.)

It’s been a crazy, wonderful year, and usually I’d have a lot to say about it. We never thought we’d find ourselves in the position we’re in today, with a million Pis sold, a sprawling community, real evidence that kids are picking the Pi up and learning with it, and new friends from all over the world.

But you hear from me all the time. So for today’s post I’ve asked members of the Pi family to share a few words with us about the way this year has looked to them instead. This is a long post. But it’s a good’un.

Clive Beale, Director of Educational Development, Raspberry Pi
When I asked everyone for a couple of paragraphs, Clive was the only one who responded with a screenplay. Before coming to work for us full-time, Clive volunteered for the Foundation on things educational, and also moderated the forums. Wondering where Scep went? He’s Clive.

Last year, Clive built a whole-pig-roasting device out of a dead shopping trolley.

FADE IN:

INT. STUDY – NIGHT

CLIVE is hunched over a crufty computer keyboard, cursing under his breath and frantically mashing keys like someone playing Track and Field after eighteen double espressos.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. STUDY – DAY

Clive is now pressing the F5 key once a minute with his nose. He bobs slowly up and down, like a sad Dippy Bird who has lost his top hat. He is weeping gently.

–

I cannot tell a lie, I killed that server. I did it with my little F5 key. But it paid off though, and a month later I had one of the first Raspberry Pis. Since then it’s been a complete blur of a year: mainly manic, sometimes surreal; but always exciting, always fun and always rewarding. One of the highlights for me was writing the blog for a couple of weeks while Liz took a break – I’m always amazed by what the community is doing with the Raspberry Pi and it was a pleasure to show their projects off. The forum members deserve a special mention too – it’s a huge community now (with nearly 58,000 members at the last count), but still has a helpful, friendly feel to it, and there’s a real energy about the place with tons of fantastic stuff going on.

It has been a remarkable year for the Raspberry Pi Foundation but also for me – two weeks ago I left teaching to start work as the Foundation’s Director of Educational Development. Our mission is (and always has been) an educational one. We want to change how people see computing, to give them access to stuff so that they can create and play and learn. We want kids of all ages to be empowered by computer science, to learn essential life skills and to have fun on the way. I’m looking forward to helping make that happen.

Mike Buffham, Premier Farnell/element14
Mike’s been our main contact at Farnell all along, and has worked wonders with negotiating parts prices, liaising with manufacturers and sorting out distribution. His personalised numberplate makes us all numb with envy.

If ever there was a word to describe the last 12 months it would be “Rollercoaster”! Six AM (UK) on Wednesday 29 February 2012 is a time I remember well, as I was sitting in my hotel room in Nuremberg, logged onto the Farnell/element14 website to check that everything went live OK. And then…BOOM!

To say that the demand for Raspberry Pi on day one was unprecedented would be an understatement, so by the time we got to the “launch” on our stand at Embedded World later that day (complete with an actual working model!) I had worn out 2 batteries on my Blackberry getting the latest demand updates, production updates and so on. The first few weeks continued to be fairly spectacular as we worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to close out various compliance testing, production and componentry issues, not to mention component supply. I remember one pivotal week in early April very well, when from my holiday deckchair, we negotiated supply of Broadcom 2835s and Samsung memory through to the end of September which, on reflection, gave us the platform to build our production plans on for the year!

Supply was clearly a challenge in the first few months, but during this time we worked very hard both with our original contract manufacturer in China, to drive the production volumes we required, and with the Foundation to bring the manufacturing of the Raspberry Pi to the UK. When we announced the deal with Sony UK Tec in September it was quickly followed by the launch of the 512MB board in October. The move to UK production remains something we are very proud to have been involved in. Now with Model As launched and shipping I have to admit at looking forward to year two with even more excitement, as there is no doubt in my mind that the success of Raspberry Pi has only just begun as it continues to change the computing landscape in education and elsewhere!

James Hughes, Broadcom
James likes cars and Kylie Minogue. (He likes her so much that he’s got a little photo of her tacked up above his desk.) He accidentally grew a beard for Movember because nobody told him he was supposed to concentrate on the top lip only.

It’s been quite a year! As someone who has helped out in the forums from very early days, but who is also an employee of Broadcom who works with the VideoCore every day, it’s been fascinating being part of this Raspberry Pi phenomenon. From the lead-up to the launch, helping out with testing out wireless adapters, trying different languages and applications (and learning much more Linux on the way) to the complete panic of the launch day when it suddenly became clear that this device was going to be much more popular than anyone had ever imagined, it’s been a fantastic roller-coaster ride. The last year, which has simply flown by, has been mainly forum moderation (a very busy work life on other stuff at Broadcom preventing any real development work), and it has been a real privilege to help out, and see the community grow from the first few members to the over 55 thousand we have today.

There have been ups and down as with any venture; occasional rants from irate members, desperate dealings with those who have waited such a long time to get their Raspberry Pi’s, fencing with OSS people on the subject of binary blobs, and of course the occasional fed up emails from an irate Liz after something behind the scenes has derailed the latest blog posting!

So, what is on the list for the coming year? Well, more development work on the camera module code is my current project, for which I have high hopes, and of course, more forum moderation, but the community is doing so well in supporting itself that that job becomes less and less onerous every day. And I think that highlights the most impressive thing about the last year – the way in which the community has grown from a tiny acorn, to a fascinating oak tree of people who, by now, know much more about the Raspberry Pi than I do, and are more than willing to donate their knowledge and time to help out this tiny charity with big educational aims.

Dr Gordon Hollingworth, Head of Software, Raspberry Pi
Gordon has a really interestingly shaped collar bone, thanks to a bike-racing accident. There are guinea pigs in his dining room. He is subject to brain-freeze if there isn’t a Rubik’s cube within arm’s length. Don’t start a conversation about cycling with him unless there’s nowhere you need to be soon.

Looking back over the past year, I must admit there are a few words I’d rather have had to live without: “USB, Synopsys, FIQ, IRQ, Split transactions”. They have been the bane of the last nine months!

My journey with Raspberry Pi probably started back three years ago with something we called the MicroDB at the time, when I played around with the helmet cam I’d hooked up for my bike, and after shoving it under Eben’s nose for the tenth time he and David finally took it to the BBC and showed them how small and beautiful such a piece of engineering could be. People just didn’t understand that a whole computer could be encapsulated into such a small space, and that first interview sparked the imagination of a million people.

I remember Eben telling me about the Foundation’s plan to create the hardware based on BCM2835 (a chip I had a lot of involvement in creating), and him saying that he thought 10K was a good number to start with!

My involvement from that point on was more of a friend to the project, using my group’s resources to help progress the project, organising and pushing for support at Broadcom both over and under the radar! In my past work at Broadcom I wrote the USB boot code for 2835 (this is the ability of the 2835 to boot directly from a PC with no SD card), so when I realised there were problems in the USB that couldn’t just be explained away by power problems I got out the USB analyser and got to work.

Over the past year I realised that my job at Broadcom was becoming less fun and my Raspberry Pi work more fun until I finally decided it was time to work full time for Raspberry Pi.

What am I doing now? Well in general it’s USB, camera board, display board, some things I have been forbidden to talk about at all…oh, and herding cats, but that’s a story for another day!

Helen Lynn, High Priestess of Facebook, Raspberry Pi
Once, Helen and I went skinny-dipping in the Cam on a sunny midsummer’s evening, out in the countryside where the river is full of rats and barbed wire. Happily, nobody caught anything.

When Eben and Liz first suggested that I do some work on behalf of the Raspberry Pi Foundation during the ten-ish hours out of every 24 for which my then-almost-one-year-old was sort of reliably asleep, I regretfully turned them down; it was quite clearly a daft idea.

Ho hum.

Several months, a surprise bout of meningitis and most of a pregnancy later, I’m running Facebook and Google+ pages for Raspberry Pi and reflecting on their cunning, as well as their incomprehensible conviction that I’m not about to disappear again without warning thanks to early labour or a freak accident with a Tommee Tippee sippy cup or, I dunno, rabies. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is new to both social media platforms, but the astonishing community of Pi fans isn’t; we’ve been warmly welcomed, and it’s exciting to begin figuring out what we can do with these new ways of talking with people.

If, over the next year, we can support teenagers to participate in the kind of active, knowledgeable, helpful and enthusiastic Raspberry Pi communities that adult makers and hackers currently enjoy, I’ll be thrilled. We need to make sure there are obvious ways in and plenty of support for young people whose family and friends aren’t engineers and programmers and scientists, and who haven’t been given reasons to start from the assumption that they’re going to be able to do this; and, crucially, we have to make sure we’re talking to girls as well as boys. I’ll be watching from behind a couple of very small people.

Glenn Jarrett, RS Components
Glen’s our main contact at RS. My mother-in-law saw him on the TV news at our launch last year and has been describing him as “that lovely man on television” ever since.

Wow, what a year! In the 75 year history of RS we have never experienced a phenomenon like the Pi that has seen such a fantastic level of interest and demand. I think we can all confidently say that we’ll look back at Raspberry Pi as a milestone in the history of technology, and I’m very proud that RS has been a part of bringing Raspberry Pi to the world. Even though this first year has flashed past (not without a few challenges on the way!) it’s clear that this is the beginning of something much bigger. We’d like to congratulate the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the Pi community for their spirit of innovation, vision and tenacity, and their contribution to the world of technology, education and industry.

Paul Beech, Pimoroni
Paul’s had as curious a trajectory as any of us this year. When he won the competition to design a logo for the Raspberry Pi, he was a jobbing freelance designer. Now he’s a factory owner and employer, making awesome stuff to go with your Pi. Paul has a fetching selection of bobble hats. Next week, he’s helping me decorate the office. He says he’s found some raspberry-coloured blackboard paint.

Year 1 of the Pi. It’s been about transformation. The ludicrously low price of the Pi helps those who most need a leg up. It’s the difference between a lot of things happening or not happening. For Pimoroni it’s been about changing from coders and designers to makers and engineers. For a movement built around a neat little hardware board the people have been the best thing. The people at the Jams who ask “What can I do with my Pi?”, the people who’ve taken the time to tell us how they’re using the Pibow. The wonderful peeps at Adafruit and our friends at MagPi, Access Space, NottingHack and EMFCamp. Most of all the people of the Raspberry Pi Foundation for working tirelessly to make things better. Eben and Liz. We less-than-three you

What’s the plan for Year 2? First job: deliver on our promise of the Picade. It’s going to be awesome and we’re having fun overcoming the design challenges and noodling. Now that Pis are in the hands of a lot of people, we want to help them understand the possibilites and use the Pi to make insanely great stuff. We’ll be making tutorials and videos available and visiting a lot of Maker Faires. We’ll be producing add-on kits for the Pi. We’ll have more maker stuff available in our new shop and we’re working on making 2013 the year Making became big, with the Raspberry Pi as a wonderful beating heart.

We want people to do something rather than nothing.

Pete Stevens, Mythic Beasts
Pete directs the Cambridge company that hosts this website. He is bearded, he runs faster than burglars, and he is marrying the luscious Fiona this summer.

A year ago at around 6am, we replaced the main Raspberry Pi website with a static page with the launch announcement expecting a bit of traffic. About thirty seconds after this went up and we saw the actual traffic load destroy all the linked-to sites, we wondered if we needed to start making a bigger plan.

We moved the main Pi website and forums to a decently fast server to provide a set of forums where trolls ~~can be rude to us all~~ are thrashed to within an inch of their lives with the Golden Banhammer. I stole Mooncake, ransomed her back for my first Pi, and turned it into a mirror server which shipped around 3000 SD card images before dying last week with a flash card filesystem error. Turns out the USB networking code wasn’t quite as crash prone as we all expected!

Pete Lomas, Founding Trustee and Hardware Guru, Raspberry Pi Foundation
You all know who Pete is, but what you might not know is that he owns a pair of tartan trousers.

I’ve spent the week at Embedded World in Germany, where Raspberry Pi had its first official outing just a year ago. People also ask me “why has Raspberry Pi been so successful?” It’s something I’ve pondered over the last few weeks. In large part it’s all the people who have posted their thoughts and comments in this blog. Without them, their damn hard work and their support for the vision we all share as to what Raspberry Pi is all about we would be – well – nowhere.

So to all one million of you, thanks a million for making Raspberry Pi what it is!

Jack Lang, Chair, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Jack’s a king among entrepreneurs, has a brick pizza oven in his garden and holds a commercial fireworks licence.

What a year it has been! Who knew we would sell over a million units? We could not have done it without the support of the community, both locally in Cambridge, our manufacturing and distribution partners and wider via the forums, blogs and twitters Thank you all. We seem to have discovered both a new category of computer hardware, and a new business model. One of the key lessons is how effective the open source community is, and the importance of the engineering staff meeting and communicating with the users in the community.

However we must not get complacent and let hubris take over; there is still a lot to do, in both hardware and software. In hardware we must continue to optimise, innovate and improve cost/performance both of the core product and peripherals such as the upcoming camera board. In software there is optimisation, documentation, and fixing holes like HTML5 performance. We need to make the out-of-the-box experience easier for non-experts. There is a whole slew of learning software and content we want to support, and I’m working on author assessable MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to support our educational mission. We should also acknowledge the wonderful work being done by the Computing at School group.

We want to bring enlightenment and knowledge, based on solid computational thinking, to many. We have been handed golden opportunities to build on.

What time are we going to the pub?

James Adams, Head of Hardware, Raspberry Pi
When I first met James, his car door wouldn’t open, so he had to get in and out like a more muscly version of Bo from the Dukes of Hazzard. He brews his own beer and owns a lathe.

Not much for me to write seeing as I’ve only been here 3 weeks!

I suppose the Raspberry Pi story for me started several years ago when I was leading the Broadcom ASIC team designing the 3D graphics accelerator in VideoCore4 (BCM2835). I certainly didn’t expect that chip to end up where it is today. Later on, I left Broadcom for another engineering job in Cambridge, but stayed in touch with Eben and the team.

Having watched the Raspberry Pi phenomenon grow over the past year I was delighted to join the engineering team in January as its newest member. I very much look forward to working with everyone to help further the exceptional work that has already taken place on this most worthy of projects!

Eben Upton, Executive Director, Raspberry Pi
Last year, Eben thought he might have got gout. Turns out he just has flat feet. Although he is 34 years old, Eben still plays with LEGO.

This year’s had some good bits and some tough bits (things like the surprise EMC testing, the magjack nightmare and the cynical and occasionally downright nasty reaction from some people to our very earnest attempt to open source as much of the multimedia drivers as possible) – but the good bits outweigh the tough so much. For me, the best part has been watching kids using the Pi and learning the things I’ve always loved: the schools visits, events like Broadcom MASTERS and the photos and videos parents and the children themselves send us discussing their projects make me very happy.

It’s great to see companies like Google and Broadcom, in their different ways, embrace and encourage Raspberry Pi. Broadcom has started really regarding the Raspberry Pi as something it believes in and is proud to be involved with. We are so grateful for their continuing to allow their engineers to volunteer for the Foundation, and the projects that we have been involved in through the Broadcom Foundation align really well with our educational aims. And, of course, concrete support like the million-dollar grant we just received from Google goes a long way to helping us achieve our goals.

One of the wonderful things about the success of the Pi has been that we’re able to take the money that we make from selling them, and do a range of things which we think are really useful for the community. On the technical side we are able to subsidise development and optimisation of open-source software like Pixman, Weston, Scratch and LibreOffice (you’ll see the results of this work later this year). And on the educational side, we’re developing educational materials and employing people like Clive to work with our partners to make the whole enterprise run smoothly; and to allow us to get Pis into the hands of the kids we want to see using them.

It’s been a privilege to work with so many remarkable engineers, business people and educators. It’s been a privilege to meet so many hackers, kids and electronic enthusiasts. And it’s been a privilege to be involved in something which I think just might end up changing the way we learn and the things we build for good.

UKScone, Forum Mod and Shoulder to Cry On, Raspberry Pi
A genuine Englishman in New York, Scone is a caffeinated gentleman who carries a stick, mostly, from what I can make out, to whack unruly youngsters with. He’s rubbish at using chopsticks. He mails me cheerful things and keeps me sane. Scone is brilliant.

It’s been a year since the Raspberry Pi was unleashed on the public, although thanks to a quirk of the calendar it’s only a quarter of a year and because “she who cannot be named, but who has a distinct lack of understanding on the meaning of the word quarter when talking about dates” probably chose the the day the 29^th of February as the release date, I’ve christened this event the “1^st Annual Raspberry Pi Liziversary”.

It’s has been a hell of a year though. The Raspberry Pi has gone from zero in the wild to over a million with no sign of the sales slowing down, and the Raspberry Pi community has grown from a couple of hundred members to over fifty five thousand on the forums alone. Several successful businesses have either been started or expanded to supply cases, add-ons, books and other Raspberry Pi related doodads, and the bottom line of the two manufacturing partners looks much more rosy these days thanks to the Raspberry Pi.

It hasn’t all been sweetness and light, unicorns, bluebirds and rainbows however, as there were teething problems with manufacture, supply, delays, a couple of design buglets (which were fixed in Revs 1.1 & 2) and the things that you’d expect when you have a global business with no actual employees. But on a scale of one to ten for the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s goals I’d say they were at a seven: they’ve got the hardware out there, a nice ecosystem of third parties offering extras and the educational documentation and software is steadily progressing. Bravo Raspberry Pi Foundation.

On a personal level the Raspberry Pi has changed my life. I’ve gone from basically being a bit agoraphobic and anti-social to someone who actually ventures outside for things other than to do the grocery shopping and laundry and I actually talk to people occasionally. As a direct result of the Raspberry Pi I’ve been to two OHSummits, two Maker Faire NYC’s and started taking an interest in what others are doing hardware and software wise. I’ve actually completed a few projects I’d been putting off for years, and have started building hardware again after a twenty-year break. I also have a supplier who can satisfy my desire for illicit Twiglets. However, it hasn’t all been positive, as I now spend the majority of my day on the Raspberry Pi forum moderating and replying to posts to the detriment of the housework and my “playing with the cats” time, and my addiction to “cozy” mysteries is going unsatisfied as I can no longer read one every day or so; it’s taking me a week to read only one.

Where will things be in a years time? I don’t know, but remember that the Amstrad CPC line sold 3 million in its lifetime, The BBC Micro 1.5 million and the Sinclair Spectrum 5 million; so round that up to 10 million, think of the number of professional engineers and programmers they produced between them, and then think of the 1 million (so far) Raspberry Pis out there. It’s only ten percent, but that’s still an awful lot compared to just a few years ago.

Good things are going to happen. Happy birthday Raspberry Pi!

Rob Bishop, Developer Evangelist, Raspberry Pi
Rob was a full 24 hours later than anyone else in getting me some text for this post. He rides a skateboard to the office.

When I began my internship at Broadcom aged 18, straight out of school, I had no idea that it would be the start of a journey that would eventually find me writing about being the first engineering employee of the fastest-growing computer company in the world from a hotel room in Lisbon, Portugal after giving a public workshop so popular that we had over 200 people on the waiting list…

In many ways I owe all of my involvement in the Raspberry Pi journey to that internship. I got to spend that year working with a Broadcom team on what would be marketed at CES as “the world’s smallest HD camcorder” and which ended up being in many ways the proof of concept for a Broadcom processor based Raspberry Pi. I still remember meeting Eben for the first time after we had the early prototypes of that hardware back from manufacture and how passionate he was about making a “keychain computer” that everybody could own. If it wasn’t for his passion I’m fairly sure there would be roughly a million people who wouldn’t now own something very similar to what he talked to me about on that day. Thanks for everything Eben.

I can’t wait to see where we end up by this time next year…

Professor Alan Mycroft, Founding Trustee, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Alan has treated this post as an exercise in talking about himself in the third person. He is terrifyingly, preternaturally good at chess, and co-wrote the Norcroft C complier, which means his terrifying, preternatural DNA is still present in ARM’s commercial compiler offering.

Alan Mycroft seems to have fallen into the role of doing talks on Raspberry Pi, e.g. for Sky News, BBC (Newsround, not Newsnight, unfortunately) and was part of the Guardian’s panel on ICT and Computer Literacy.

He also gave invited presentations to Computing at School, Campus Party Europe (10,000 geeks at Berlin Tempelhof ex-airport) and at ComputerBasedMath.org at the Royal Institution. Currently he is in India mixing his day job (researcher in programming languages, compilation and static analysis) with Raspberry Pi interests — not to mention a good bit of tourism in this amazing country.

He gave the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT’s are the Indian Oxbridge for Computer Science and Engineering and related subjects) talk “Raspberry Pi — putting the fun back into computing”) on 27 February, and is talking to possible partners in India.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is investigating reasons why BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) import far fewer Raspberry Pis than more advanced economies, and that’s something Alan is exploring in India — partly tariffs, but complaints on the ground include delivery mark-ups etc.

Plans for next year include more of the same and a regression to a misspent electronics youth (rehab anyone?) in finding time to assemble the hardware and software to replace current automated-number-plate-recognition equipment at the (University of Cambridge’s) Computer Laboratory with a Raspberry Pi version.

Dr Lorna Lynch, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Lorna has a PhD and three (count them) Masters’ degrees. She knits complicated and beautiful things, and makes her own yarn on a proper spinning wheel. One of my proudest achievements of the last year has been teaching her toddler how to Vogue.

I’ve only been working directly for the Foundation since December, but I’ve been following the development of the Raspberry Pi with interest for ages: it’s a wonderful device, and I’m so excited to see all the amazing projects users have been working on during this first year.

I’ve been working on trademark enforcement, running the Twelve Pis of Christmas auction, and doing other general bits and pieces. Because I have a small child at home, I’m working part-time, but I’m very happy to have this chance to be working with friends, and supporting a project in which I wholeheartedly believe. My son really is too small to learn to use a Pi at the moment (at just two, he’d probably reduce one to its constituent atoms within minutes), but I can’t wait for the time when he is old enough to start tinkering around with one, and learning to write his own games, just like his dad did on a BBC Micro back in the 80s. I’m even feeling a strong temptation to start learning Python myself! I can’t wait to see what the next year brings, but I know I am both excited and grateful to be a part of it.

David Braben, Founding Trustee, Raspberry Pi Foundation
David is the guy who ensured many of the Foundation’s employees got lousy school reports because we were all to busy playing Elite. He has excellent glasses that make him look like a German architect.

It is now a year since we went ‘live’ selling Raspberry Pis, selling out in a small number of seconds at 6am on 29^thFebruary. A year ago I did the rounds at Television Centre – BBC News 24, BBC Radio 4’s today program, Radio 5 Live, BBC Worldwide, and a few local stations. By the end of that we had sold out of our initial batch.

The reaction and positivity to Raspberry Pi has been great. From that initial reaction from John Humphrys and Jim Nauchtie, to David Cameron, to all the excellent projects we have seen since. As we crossed a million sales just after Christmas, I loved the idea that a million people have been inspired to do something new. While I appreciate that many will be used in media centres or whatever, I like to think we have already made a difference to a lot of people.

It has certainly changed thinking. We already have Computer Science coming back to schools as part of the EBacc, but we have an exciting future too. Fantastic help from many, and a generous donation from Google, all help with this.

Here’s to another great year!

Abishur, Forum Mod Extraordinaire, Raspberry Pi
We wouldn’t have a forum without Abishur; he puts in a vast amount of behind-the-scenes work, and he’s patient, affable and knowledgeable. He’s the only person in this lengthy post whom I haven’t met yet (pesky geography), but I feel like we’ve been friends for ages – when I’m next in Texas I’m going to make the trip to Fort Worth just to see him, and buy him a very large, cold beer.

Today the Pi turns one. (Happy Birthday Raspberry Pi Foundation!) It’s been an immensely fun ride thus far. I’ve been one of the lucky few who found the Pi in its infancy when it was just a simple blog with some people in the comments wondering about getting a forum. When said forum arrived, I remember being so excited when we hit 500 forum members… and then 1000 and 2000. People grew concerned that they might be one of the unlucky few who wouldn’t get a Pi. Just before the launch the forum had 12,123 members, and as it turns out that was the tiniest fraction of people who wanted a Pi and wanted it *right* now.

Today we have 57,544 board members, 86,518 Twitter followers, and just as many “likes” spread across the various Raspberry Pi Facebook sites. There are more than 1 million Raspberry Pi boards out there now. It’s a staggering number for a device that we thought, back when there were only 500 of us, would sell 10K in its entire lifetime.

While it goes without say that we’re all enamored with Eben and co for working so hard to make this device, and with Liz for running all over the globe to make sure things continue to run smoothly for the Pi, a huge thanks goes out to all of the community members! The Pi is only as amazing as it is because y’all (yes, y’all, I’m a Texan :-p ) have run with it. You’ve turned it into a music controller for a printer, LED games stations, media centers, retro gaming consoles, you’ve dedicated bandwidth to help host Pi installation images, Raspbian repositories, and your own special code. You’ve sent it into (near) space and across the world.

Thanks everyone for making Year One of the Raspberry Pi so incredible! Hopefully Year Two will push the Pi even further, though if you could make your posts a little less interesting I’d really appreciate it. I’d like to finally be able to get my own Pi Sprinkler Control finished at some point!

Mooncake, Official Cat, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Mooncake doesn’t really do much besides sleeping and eating. She has not really been very helpful this year, but we like having her around.

Meeow.

Alex Bradbury, University of Cambridge and mighty Linux hacker
When he’s not working on his thesis, Alex volunteers for Raspberry Pi, doing arcane and wonderful things to improve the software stack. He had a birthday yesterday too.

The year since the launch of the Raspberry Pi has of course been both busy and exciting. We’ve seen major developments in the Raspberry Pi software stack including improved performance. A significant event was the release of Raspbian (a Debian port optimised for the Raspberry Pi’s CPU) which is to me still the most impressive Raspberry Pi-related project. I’ve also enjoyed the opportunity to attend and talk at great conferences like Linux.conf.au, keynote at both PyCon UK and PyCon IE, as well as give a range of smaller talks. I’ve met many fantastic people I would not have had the opportunity to meet otherwise and hope this will continue. In the next year, I think we’ll really start to see what sort of performance can be squeezed out of the device. There’s been fantastic progress made so far, but it will be exciting to see what more can be done as applications like Scratch and key libraries like Pixman receive significant optimisation work. I’m also expecting to see the continued development of the library of Raspberry Pi-oriented educational material. With events like the release of Minecraft Pi and so much more in the pipeline, I believe it’s completely feasible for the Raspberry Pi to be a top present for kids next Christmas.

Dom Cobley, Broadcom
Dom’s another indefatigable volunteer. He’s upsettingly clever. He will beat you at any board game you put in front of him, usually for money, and has lovely big blue eyes. Dom is mostly nocturnal.

About two and a half years ago, after years of working with VideoCore, I got presented with a BCM2835 development board and a vague request to get Linux and 3d and video demos running. The ARM was snuck into 2835 as a bit of skunkworks from Eben, who had these wild ideas about the general public being able to buy a breakout board for our chip and program it themselves. Sounded great to me, but far-fetched. The only problem was that I knew very little about Linux. None of us did. But we had printk, and text came out of the uart, so that was enough to get started.

And eventually we got Ubuntu to boot. And Firefox to open a web page. Now, we’ve since discovered dozens of things that make the chip faster, but back then it took many minutes to render the simplest webpage. But you could see the potential. “apt-get install” seemed magical. I’ve ported all sorts of software to VideoCore, and it’s hard work, but the ARM had all the packages you could think of, just there.

Just over a year ago, Eben put the first “production” Pi board on my desk. Apart from one brief scare (the red bodge wire in the beta boards), I got it up and running and that evening recorded a video of it doing stuff called Raspberry Pi Beta Board Bring up. It was viewed by 100K people in a few days. And since then I’ve been busy…

Liz Upton, Head of Communications, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Liz is…ah, forget it.

I’ve not got much to add. Thank you all for making this the most exciting, exhausting, entertaining year I’ve ever spent. Thanks to all my colleagues for being some of the best people in the world to work with. Thanks to the volunteers for your generosity: nothing’s worth more than your personal time, and we’re still amazed that so many of you offer it so freely. Big shout-out to the forum and blog mods and admins, the MagPi guys and the Raspberry Jammers here – you rock. Thanks to the open-source community for all the work on documenting, porting and evangelising you do. Thanks to Eben for managing to carry on doing some superb husbanding, despite some pretty serious stressors. (It’s tough enough doing his job, but doing it with a wife who sleep-talks about banhammers is awful, or so I’m led to believe.)

And thanks to you personally, whoever you are, for reading this blog and for being curious about what we do here. This year’s been a hell of a ride. I hope you’ll stay with us to watch what we do with the next one.

Pete reports from Campus Party, São Paulo

Pete Lomas, the Raspberry Pi’s hardware designer and all-round good egg, has just been in São Paulo, Brazil, speaking at Campus Party. He sent me this report with a stern warning to edit it thoroughly. Thanks so much Pete – sounds like you had quite the trip!

A spot of housekeeping: I’m travelling all day Monday and some of Tuesday (a byzantine bit of ticket-price optimisation and the fitting in of meetings means that Eben and I have to take three planes and drive about 150 miles to get from California to Cambridge). I’ll be posting here on Tuesday only if I feel awake enough to make sense…

Over to Pete!

Crunch together a 76,000 m² exhibition hall, 8000 campuseiros and an equivalent number of computers, 10 presentation stages, a 30Gb internet connection and a host of national and international speakers, and you have the week-long event that is Campus Party Brazil 2013. Next to all of this shenanigans, there’s another large hall full of tents for the campuseiros - not surprising given that the activities run from 10am until 10pm every day, followed by trips to the Sambadrome till the early hours (or so they tell me). It’s only a week until carnival starts here in São Paulo, and preparations are in full swing.

Mission Control

Tents ‘r’ Us

The size and scale of Campus Party and the host city of São Paulo take my breath away. From the tallest building in the city centre, the urbanisation extends as far as the eye can see (and the rain clouds permit). I suppose you would expect this for a city of 18M people, but in person it goes far beyond your most febrile imaginings.

The atmosphere is just amazing; enthusiasm and excitement is bubbling up everywhere. I was going to say it was ‘electrifying’, but that’s taken care of by two sizeable generator sets providing power to the party. The main Anhembi campus feed cannot cope with the demands of Campus Party.

Serious power

The activities are an eclectic mix of teaching, modding, hacking, competitions and other events decided on largely by the campuseiros themselves. Campus Party takes care of the high-level organisation, security, tents and keynotes; and also provides space for local companies to show their wares in a visitor area that has free admission for the general public.

Robot competition area

Games are much in evidence, with presentations from many of the key players, along with the Intel Extreme Masters tour qualifier for the World Championships Season 6, who I ended up competing with during my presentation – I lost by at least 90db!.

I’d been asked to give a talk about Raspberry Pi to this enormous audience, on one of the largest stages we’ve been invited to present from. (Video of the talk is at the bottom of the page.)

Life of Pi

After the talk I met up very briefly with a young Pi enthusiast and his family. He has made a robot with WiFi based on Pi. I would have loved to talk longer but press interviews had been lined up and I was keeping them waiting, not a good plan, or so I’m told by Liz!

Liz interjects: I am wounded! I actually make a point of getting our principals to spend as much time with members of the community as they can; unfortunately, this time Pete was dragged away by the organisers, who needed to keep things running smoothly and to schedule. WiFi robot family: please get in touch – you’ll find my email address on the Contacts page under the About link above. Pete was really impressed by what you’re doing, and we’d love to learn some more about it and perhaps feature it here on the blog.

Pi Robot

After a quick change, the family was properly kitted out!

An important feature (for me) is the classrooms where dedicated volunteers take groups of school children and give them a first touch of a computer class, or an overview of social media for the more advanced students. Over the week over 4000 children pass through, a remarkable achievement. Coupled with a meal and an hour or so of game-playing afterwards, the kids really seemed enjoy the whole experience.

One of the Campus Party classrooms between sessions

While most of the talks and events were PC-related, there was a really positive contribution from the Raspberry Pi community, with talks from John (maddog) Hall on educational use of Pi and XBMC.

Quite literally on the floor of the hall, I found Alex Ferreira (on the left) giving a tutorial on hardware modding and interfacing.

Alex teaching interfacing – he tried to do a part-ex – Pi for Arduino!

He broke off momentarily to show me one of his more spectacular case mods.

Extreme case-modding

Judging by the number of interviews I gave, plus the number of groups that stopped me on the floor to have a look at the Raspberry Pi, interest in Brazil is certainly growing.

One special interview was by Luciana, a upper school student from Sao Paulo. She is using Raspberry Pi in her final-year project. She was tremendously enthusiastic, and some of her questions incisive. Although her project is still to be fully debugged, she remained completely upbeat that she would get there.

Pete is interviewed by Luciana

It was particularly satisfying to have positive discussions with Campus Party team about featuring Raspberry Pi in their London event in September, announced by John Doddrell, the British Consulate General, here in São Paulo. Exact dates and venue are to be announced soon.

Giving John Doddrell a quick rundown of the features of Raspberry Pi

I’ve demonstrated the Pi so often this week, I can do it with my eyes closed!

So thanks to everyone at Campus Party that gave Raspberry Pi and myself such a warm welcome, and to the UK in Brazil team for inviting us over. I’m sure we’ll be back soon.

Liz again: Thank you Pete! Next time we send you to Brazil, let’s try to make sure you get some free time as well – I hear those beachside caipirinhas are quite something!

Video of Pete’s talk is below. He says he wishes it’d been edited down; I think it’s perfect.

Twelve Pis of Christmas: Pete Lomas

Merry Christmas everybody! I hope you all found what you were hoping for in your stockings.

Today’s charity auction of a Model A Raspberry Pi and accessories has been set up to benefit Claire House Children’s Hospice, which aims to enhance the quality of life for children and young people with a life-limiting or life-threatening condition. Pete Lomas a Founding Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and MD of hardware design and manufacture company Norcott Technologies, selected Claire House as his charity. All money raised in this auction will be donated directly to Claire House. Click here, or on Pete’s Christmas visage, to bid!

Farnell at Electronica

RS weren’t the only people with Pis at Electronica: Farnell were there too, so we had representation from 100% of our core distributors. Pete Lomas (you should know who Pete is by now) and Gert (ditto) were there with them, and took the time to give some interviews to our good Farnell buddy Mike Powell. Here’s Pete:

Gert’s had a haircut! (And has some interesting stuff to say about the pre-built Gertboard…)

There’s more from Gert at Eetimes – it’s in an unembeddable format, so you’ll have to click through.

Andrew Robinson from Manchester University, who is behind the group making the Pi-Face breakout board was in attendance too:

And there was a Pi-powered talking chicken.

I’m *so* going to have to try to make next year’s event.

Sony, the Pi makers – a post from Pete Lomas

Pete Lomas is a trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and designed the final hardware that turned into the Raspberry Pi. We’ve had so many questions from you about the manufacturing process that Pete decided to put this post together – he’s been working on it for a couple of months, and we’re very, very grateful. Thanks Pete – and thank you to everybody at the Sony factory!

The basic idea is simple – Attach components a PCB with solder to make mechanical and electrically conductive joints, test and ship.

But how do Sony manage to make 4000 Raspberry Pi Model B’s a day – or more astoundingly, one every 7.5 seconds? On a recent trip to the facility we had a look at how the team at Pencoed actually do it, and some of the technical wizardry and skill they use to make it happen.

The Raspberry Pi design is what is termed double sided SMT and single sided PTH. Translated, this means it has surface mount components (SMT) mounted on both sides of the PCB and through hole (PTH) components just on the top side, with the pins pushing out of the bottom.

The PCBs are actually mounted in a panel (or plaque) of six, christened after Liz’s earlier post a “six-pack of Pis”. This has several functions: first it reduces handling at both bare PCB manufacture and assembly as the PCBs travel together all the way to final test and pack. It also provides an area (waste edge) around the PCBs that the machines use to clamp the panel firmly in place. When you are whacking components down at 5.5 parts per second, you want to avoid vibration. It also allows Sony to get round the fact that some components on the Raspberry Pi come right over the edges. If you look at the design in the photograph you can see there are also small areas of waste laminate between the board. Ideally the designer (i.e. me) wants to avoid this but it is not always possible.

This shows a partially finished six-pack of Pis. The strips with dots on will be broken away to separate out the Pis just before test. The bottom left Pi is being given a quick-process validation test.

The manufacturing line is actually made up of four key processes, bottom SMT, top SMT, PTH, test and pack, but the skill of the Sony team goes much further back than that into production engineering and component procurement.

This is the surface mount line used to build Pis. The front machine (white dome) is the one used to print the solder paste. On the very front of it is a loader that can be filled with PCBs. The line automatically takes them as required.

Ingredients

Sony have strict policy on component procurement, and this ensures that we only get good quality parts. Vendor assessment is rigorous, and we have spent many months trawling through the BOM with Sony and validating any proposed alternatives or substitutes. Remember the issue with the mag-jack we had early days with the factory we were using in China? The Sony team are dedicated to making sure that sort of thing cannot happen.

As well as getting the right parts, they also need them in the right packaging. Everything that is required for surface mount operations has to be on a reel, ideally as large a reel as possible. For some small components that will be 10,000 on a single reel, but these will be used up in just a couple of hours, as there are 42 on each PCB. Every time a reel runs out, the line stops and requires operator intervention, so the larger the better.

Reels of components in stores

To keep the wheels turning, all the machines monitor usage and send requests to the stores themselves for replacements! So by the time they are located and booked out of stores and brought to the line, they arrive just in time before the reel runs out. Empty reels are bar-code scanned off the machine, and the new reel is bar-code scanned back on to eliminate the chance of fitting incorrect components.

This shows a screen from the system that shows the usage of each component on the machine and when it is due to run out.

Printing the solder paste

The first physical operation is to “paste” the PCB with solder paste. The paste is made up of tiny spheres of solder approximately 25μm across. The other component in the paste is flux. This is designed not only to bind the paste together but also prevents oxidation during the soldering process and is an important aspect of getting a reliable joint.

The machine uses a thin stainless-steel stencil, and the solder paste is pushed through tiny apertures onto the PCB. When the stencil is removed, you are left with tiny prints of solder. On the BGA pads for the BCM2835 these solder prints are only 300μm in diameter. If any of these prints is missing, then a solder joint will not be formed. Just sometimes, rather than the paste sticking to the PCB, it stays in the stencil. To check for this the machine does an optical check immediately after solder paste print just to make sure it is there. If there is a problem, the paste can be removed and the PCB re-printed.

This is a typical solder paste stencil (before anyone posts a comment – no, it’s not a Pi one, but shows the general idea.) These are made of stainless steel and are just 0.004″ thick.

The solder paste can be seen on top of the gold pads on the PCB. On larger areas the paste is cut into segments. This controls the amount of paste more accurately and also provides an escape route for gasses that can build up during reflow as the solvents evaporate.

Once the paste print is verified, the surface mount components can be added to the PCB using a SMT mounting machine. Sony use their own-brand machines, but there are lots to choose from. In principle they all operate the same way, with only subtle differences.

The parts are in “pockets” on each reel of tape, and they are picked out using a vacuum nozzle that is fitted to a moving chunk of mechanics and sensor electronics (the mounting head). The problem is that the parts move around in their little pockets, so the alignment of the part relative to the nozzle is somewhat inaccurate. So, if you place a part straight onto the PCB from the reel, it would be out of line. In modern placement machines this problem is solved using a small camera that looks at the part on the nozzle, figures out its exact location and rotation, and then applies correction factors to ensure that when the part is actually placed it is within 40μm of the optimum position. This accuracy is vitally important when you are placing parts that are only 0.5 by 1.0mm, or if you have tens of tightly spaced legs or pads. When they are running at full speed, these machines can place 25,000 components per hour. When you watch them, they move so quickly that it is almost impossible to see the parts being placed; they just sort of “appear”.

Some tantalum capacitors, on a reel. The pockets that hold the individual components can be seen in the tape. A secondary “cover tape” is peeled off by the machine just before the component is used.

It is difficult to move the mounting head quickly; to stop the larger parts being ripped off the nozzle by inertia the head has to accelerate and decelerate smoothly, and this all takes time. The guys who design these placement machines are real speed demons. To speed things up even further the machines can have up to 12 nozzles, and in some cases two heads working alternately. Whilst one is picking up parts the other is placing then on the PCB, and then the roles reverse.

These dual headed-machines can place at 60,000 components per hour (cph). As it turns out, they are over-specified to help us with Pi, which only has 173 surface-mount components. A 25,000 cph machine with 12 heads is sufficient. Typically, a pack of six Pis has its SMT components mounted in just 150 seconds.

Time to do some baking

Once the parts are placed on the PCBs they have to be soldered. (OK: I could say baked – it is a big oven – but don’t try this at home). The technical term is reflow. What we want to do is heat up the solder (and components) so that the little balls fuse to the component, the PCB and each other.

The reflow oven consists of a number of zones, each one getting progressively hotter until the solder melts (reflows), whereupon the joint is made. The subsequent stages then cool the PCB in a controlled way.

Getting this part of the process wrong can be a recipe for disaster. Too cold, and some of the joints will not form; too quick and the ends of some parts will not heat up evenly, leading to an embarrassing process defect called tombstoning. Too hot, and you fry some of the more delicate components, not to mention the PCB; too slow and the flux burns off before it does it job leaving poor joints: you get the idea.

Again, this is an area where technical skill and years of experience come into play; what the process engineers need to do is find what is called the “process window”, where all the factors are good enough to get reliable joints, and then aim for the ideal point somewhere in the middle. They do this by sacrificing some boards (poor Pi), and adding thermocouple instrumentation to critical parts of the board. These are connected to a mole that follows the PCBs, recording the temperature/time profile for each point. These can then be passed through the reflow oven as many times as is required to get the result. I’ve learnt after explaining this to a group of students that you need to know that the mole is in fact a piece of electronics that is heavily protected against the heat, and not a small furry animal. It took me a few seconds to figure why one of them had a really horrified expression!

Now the parts are solidly attached to the PCB the next step is AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection). Here the PCBs are inspected with a high resolution cameras, and the resulting images processed and compared with images from golden (known good) PCBs. This allows all the parts to be checked for presence, correct rotation, joint soldering and generally anything else that looks odd. Anything that looks out of kilter is then checked by a skilled operator. Sometimes the AOI can be over-fussy and give a false fail, but once I had just a few chips in a reel of 5000 that had whole corner missing, the AOI picked it up in an instant.

All these quality processes are important as it allows Sony to drive down the defect rates to almost unbelievable low levels. They utilise quality principles like Kaizen and lean along with six sigma quality targets. Six sigma is a challenging defect rate of 3.4 faults per million. Unfortunately, that does not mean that only 3.4 Pis in a million will have a problem (in the factory); it relates to everything that could go wrong. These potential problems are termed “Defect Opportunities”. From an assembly point of view, a typical Pi has 100’s opportunities for things to go wrong, like a paste print defect, a missing component or a defective solder joint. The screening and test programs are designed to ensure that these Pis do not leave the manufacturing floor. Even after the Pis have passed everything, there is a quality team checking the final output, effectively checking the quality of the quality processes! The objective is that zero defects reach the customer.

Sony are proud of their quality, and make sure that everyone working the line knows what is being achieved.

PoP on top

So having gotten the underside SMT mounted, the whole process is repeated on the next SMT line for the top-side SMT components. In principle, this is just the same, but the processor and its package-on-package (PoP) memory are mounted on this side and some additional trickery is required.

Once the bulk of the components are mounted on a couple of SMT machines, the panel of boards is passed to a special placement machine that does the PoP. The BCM2835 is placed as any normal part, but the memory has to be placed on top of it. Remember: every surface mount pad that is used on the board to connect a component has had solder paste printed. So how do they get it printed onto the top of the processor? Turns out they don’t: they have a clever little tray full of solder paste in which they dip the memory chip gently, to coat the solder balls on the underside of the part, and then place that (carefully) atop the processor, job done!

I said “clever little tray” as it is constantly rotating and has a scraper bar that sets the exact depth of the paste. Coupled with that there is an automatic dispenser control system that adds more paste as required. It’s really neat, and as expected from Sony, it is the best solution giving phenomenal yields in the volumes required.

The round disk at the front is the tray that contains the solder paste – we will replace this with a short video as soon as we can.

The boards then go further down the line for topside reflow (soldering) and AOI inspection, and the SMT processes are complete. One really good process check is to have a look at joint quality, in particular finish and shape. You can get a hint from inspecting at this point that the process is wandering before it becomes an issue. The joints on the PoP memory package and BGAs are in general difficult to see, but Sony has an optical arrangement that allows an expert to have a look at least at the edges of the package. Any minor problems with shape and alignment can be observed early and adjusted out of the process. Sony also have X-ray facilities to detect bridges and missing solder balls on the underside of all BGA devices.

If you look at the maths, something does not add up. Taking 150 seconds to mount the 147 SMT parts on six Raspberry Pis does not equate to the production rate of one every 7.5 seconds. In fact there are three machines contributing to this figure, one building the underside and two for the topside. This points up another important aspect of efficient manufacture: load balancing. In the whole of the Sony process, the production engineers have ensured that each process step on average takes the same time. If it is too slow, it governs the production rate and they add additional equipment to resolve it.

Final assembly: the PTH components

The through-hole (PTH) parts are actually inserted by hand. On the Pi there are just five. The panel of PCBs are mounted on a solder- and heat-resistant carrier. This shields all the surface-mount components on the underside of the PCB so they don’t get desoldered and end up in the bottom of the solder bath when they are soldered by the wave (flow) soldering machine.

This shows the six pack of Pis with all their through-hole components added, about to be wave soldered.

So, how does this work? As the PCBs enter, the area on the underside is sprayed with flux. This stops the pins, pads and solder oxidising, and ensures a good joint. The PCBs are then (pre) heated. This is important, as it stops the solder cooling too quickly when it comes into contact with the PCB. Further on in the machine, there is a wave of molten solder (hence the name). This is continuously flowing and is pumped out and back into a heated solder pot. The height and shape of the wave and the amount of preheat, the solder pot temperature plus the speed of the PCBs is carefully controlled to ensure a quality joint. It needs skill and judgement to get this exactly right.

If the wave is too tall, it can cause components to be pushed out of the PCB, and in the worst case can cause the top of the board to be flooded with solder. This then resembles a lava flow – yep, I’ve done it! When I asked the guys at Sony about lava accidents, I just got a wry, knowing smile.

End of the line

That’s it: the six-pack of Pis is fully assembled. The Pis are then moved over to the test and packing stations. Here the individual Pis are broken out of the panel and placed on a test unit. Each station has two test units so that one can be used for loading/unloading, whilst the other is used to run the tests and also program the various setup codes such as the model and where it was made.

Here, the operator has two test rigs. One is being unloaded/reloaded while the other is testing a Pi.

A Raspberry Pi that passes the test is placed into its antistatic bag and straight into the box ready for dispatch. Any Pi that fails is going to be pretty lonely: when we were there to take these pictures the “Fail” boxes were empty bar one. That failed unit will be investigated quickly to find out what the problem is, and the defect analysed to see if a process optimisation would help. [Liz interjects: I visited Sony last week, and was told that fewer than 20 Pis have ended up in the "Fail" box since Sony started manufacture. Not bad!]

Making products in this volume also puts stress on the component parameters and the design. With such a number of boards going through, the chances of a group of parts ganging up on the designer to create a “corner case” that causes the Pi to fail test is very real. We work closely with Sony to help identify and correct those where possible. We have already identified a couple of minor tweaks to the PCB that help. For me, even after 30 years in the business, there is always something to learn and the talented team at Sony make great teachers.

The Sony team who make your Raspberry Pi. And some interlopers. Click for bigness.

After Liz, Eben and I met all the team, we can confidently say that the Raspberry Pi is made with tender, loving care in Pencoed. We know: we’ve watched it happen.

Thursday grab bag

Heatermeter

Want to control the temperature of your barbecue, smoker, firepit or clambake over a web interface? Here’s the Raspberry Pi-powered HeaterMeter. Bryan Mayland says:

HeaterMeter for RaspberryPi joins an Arduino / AVR ATmega328 microcontroller with OpenWrt running on a RaspberryPi $35 wonder-computer for the purpose of providing oven-like control of a charcoal BBQ grill via web interface. The microcontroller controls a fan which limits airflow to the pit, displays the current status on a character LCD, and passes the data on to the RaspberyPi which streams real-time updates to connected web browsers. The website also works on mobile browsers running Android or iOS, allowing users to unchain themselves from their grills and partake in many life-enriching activities such as

Going to the grocery store to buy more beer

Going to a bar to drink more beer

Not get off the couch, where your beer is

Possibly other non-beer related hobbies

Monogame

Dean Ellis has got Monogame running on his Pi. There are details of exactly what hacks he’s used to get it running so well on the YouTube page that this video comes from.

Monogame is an open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework – and it gives us all kinds of ideas about game development on the Pi. You can read some more about Dean and his Pi here.

Make Yourself at Home

We’ve been seeing a lot of visual artists using the Raspberry Pi in their installations. Whether you’re driving video or if you want to drive something with wheels, the Pi offers artists a much cheaper way of getting to their goals than the old “borrow someone’s old laptop” model. We’ve seen Pis being used in the Tate Gallery’s new Tanks in London; we’ve seen them being used in installations at Milton Keynes shopping centre. Most recently, I’ve heard from Martin Beha, who was working on the electronics side of an installation by Austrian artist Robert F Hammerstiel in Hannover. He used Raspberry Pis to make three lawnmower robots talk to each other. (You can see them from about two minutes into this video.) The result is curiously charming.

Click for more on the installation

Martin says:

The communication is established through Wireless LAN. One of the Robots is configured as a server and delivers a (completely wrong but usable) time via NTP for synchronisation. It also calculates the start time for the audio files and delivers it to the other robots via SSH and “at”. The audio is taken directly from the analog output and is amplified by an 18W amplifier module. The sound quality is quite satisfactory for speech.

The devices are powered by a second battery because the manufacturer of the lawn mower robot has built in a function that monitors if additional current is taken from the main battery and stops the robot. The 5V is generated by DC/DC-Converters for car use. Other included circuits are for example a differential amplifier against an audio ground loop and a deep discharge protector.

I chose the Raspberry Pi for reasons of flexibility, size and because there was a very limited budget. The original plan was to communicate via Bluetooth Class 1 dongles and rfcomm to get a virtual serial connection. Because of several bugs in Bluetooth I could not connect the devices and decided to choose Wi-Fi as an alternative. Depending on different (resistor) jumper settings on the GPIO-Port, the RPIs recognize their conversation role after startup and play the right file. The jumper also defines the role as server or client. So I was able to use the same SD-Card image for all robots.

The actual audio files are mp3s of a dialogue about the sense of a robot’s life, spoken by three TV announcers of Austrian national television (Austrians will surely recognize their voices).

STEM – training the teachers

There was a big Raspberry Pi event in Manchester last week, where a large group (including our very own Pete Lomas, accurately described by gocracker.com as “charismatic“) came together for a CPD/networking event for teachers at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Krisma? Bags of it.

We’re not alone in recognising that there’s a lot to be done before a new Computing syllabus arrives at schools next year in helping teachers out of the old ICT mindset and showing them how easy starting with the Pi can be. We’re really pleased to see how seriously teachers are taking the Raspberry Pi, and, as always, incredibly grateful to STEMNET for their tireless volunteering. This was the first of a series of events, where teachers were learning how to use the Pi with Manchester University’s Pi Face, getting to grips with Scratch and Python, and working on cross-curricular activities with the Raspberry Pi. A number of STEM ambassadors from industry also attended, doing that support and mentorship thing that STEMNET does so well. (I don’t think I’ve been to a single Raspberry Pi event that hasn’t been attended by at least one STEM ambassador.) We’d like to thank every one of them, and all of the teachers who are working so hard on getting to grips with a new piece of kit – we’re very grateful.

Jude’s cardboard case

Pete Wood from DesignSpark put me onto this most excellent little series of tutorial videos from Jude Pullen. Jude is a fan of cardboard. Having watched this, so am I!

Wired opinion piece from Pete Lomas

This is so good I’d kick myself if any of you missed it – head straight to Wired and read what Pete has to say about the manufacturing process and design decisions we’ve been dealing with up until now. It’s a great piece.

Pete Lomas interview

There’s a really interesting interview up with Pete Lomas at New Electronics. Pete is a trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and was responsible for the final hardware version which eventually became the Raspberry Pi: a supremely hard job of knocking down cost and size, and making impossible-seeming pragmatic decisions. If you’re interested in the hardware development side of the Raspberry Pi project, you’ll enjoy this.

As to Qs for Pete Lomas

A couple of weeks ago, I had dinner with Pete Lomas, the Raspberry Pi Foundation trustee and all round good bloke who did the hardware design for the Raspberry Pi. It was a good opportunity to put some of the questions our Twitter followers had sent to him. (You may have seen Pete in some of our videos – he’s the fella in the lab coat and tartan trousers with the soldering iron and a fistful of capacitors.) At some point the names of those asking the questions went adrift from the questions themselves (entirely my fault) – if you asked one of these and would like to be acknowledged, please leave a comment below!

Pete’s answering questions here rather than on Twitter because he is constitutionally incapable of expressing himself in fewer than 140 characters. Over to Pete:

Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?

Cos I have bird seed in my pocket – why else?

Will RAM upgrades be available soon? And do you think you will move towards the multi processor boards?

We are looking at the possibility of a Model B+ with additional RAM, but the costs do not look promising and unless we really run out of space for the cool stuff people want to do then it will be a while

Why is the Pi selective about SD cards it will work with, surely the SD SDHC is a standard? [[Liz: This is about the problems we've had with Class 10 cards.]]

It looks like the jump to smaller die and process has created some anomalies that for some reason the BCM2835 cannot handle, this is also reflected in issues with Class 10. We will publish a tested list but we have already found that the same Card manufactured in different years – have different die, the early one is OK and the later one not. This is an issue and a real pain but we are looking at it. It also affects microSD cards for identical reasons.

What beer do you like?

Peroni & Guinness – how end of the spectrum can you get. [[Liz: I will point out here that while Pete is trying to present himself as the Common Man in his beverage choices, we *did* spot a bottle of Cristal on his desk just before Christmas.]]

Are you surprised by the demand, or just feeling quietly justified that you’ve made something really cool that everyone wants?

Overwhelmed – never justified – we have a target to get these in schools and filling that gap – that’s my focus. However my 9 yr old son tells me its cool!

How to be so awesome?

(Do I even understand the question) I’d say do your best – s**t happens – but keep focused and you’ll get there…eventually. That’s what I kept telling myself trying to route out the BGA…

Why alre the USB ports so misaligned with the ethernet one?! Ok, I know the answer, but tell him – crying – all the same!

When I saw the prototype I realised I’d messed this one up – my PCB symbol’s outline was just plain wrong – makes cases kind of interesting. Eben is threatening to buy me beer until I agree to fix it – I think we will as soon as we spin.

Why no sound input on RPi ? (could have used the same audio jack but with 4 contacts – like on a mobile phone)

There are no inbuilt Audio ADC’s so there would be a cost adder – everyone was sat on my head to get costs down. They can be easily added via the GPIO.

Was there ever consideration to put Bluetooth on the Pi?

Would have been really cool but the budget would be blown - Bluetooth to USB is the way to go.

No holes, difficult casing Why not microSD and combined composite video + stereo jack to free some board space?

OK but mounting holes cost 7-8mm diameter where no tracks can go – could not see any sensible locations without compromising I/O. In plastic it is quite easy to mould catches – there is something on the way…

Ask him if there is anything he would have done differently, knowing what he knows now? Also – What was the biggest sacrifice?

There are a few niggles with the design, mounting holes, connector alignment but in the basic design, but no, it does the job. The biggest sacrifice….hmmm staying sober to do the layout …..seriously if it achieves the goal we have set – its awesomely worth it . Thanks for your support.

Can the fuses at USB be safely removed to provide >140 mA to USB or is there power concern that requires the limitation? [[Liz: I believe this is a question of interest to almost nobody but Abishur, but asked Pete to answer it because Abishur is a very helpful fellow around these parts!]]

The fuses kick in hard around 280mA and fold back and limit to 140mA. If you remove them then all you have for protection is the 700mA inbound fuse. The tracking on the board is good for 500mA+ so you could if you really wanted too. What about a powered hub – to power the Pi and bigger USB devices.

No questions, but please say THANK YOU PETE!

Thanks for you support – enjoy.