A terrific PopTech speech by Eben Upton, who started the Rasberry Pi foundation, on the lessons learned in creating what turned out to be a fantastically successful $35 computer.
“I remember sitting down with my wife for dinner...and we had this sudden, appalling realization that we had promised 600,000 people that we would build them a $25 dollar computer.”
What's clear is that he intended it to be like the BBC micro, a computer designed to be programmed. As such it's optimized for multimedia and outputting to a monitor. Unlike Arduino, which is optimized for I/O and interfacing with physical stuff (lots of analog and digital/PWM inputs and outputs), Raspberry Pi seems to be more oriented towards graphics.
Some good lessons on resilience, too. Some things didn't work, others took longer than expected and with great promise comes great expectations and no small number of critics. They just kept improving, adapting, learning and powering through. Inspiring.
Comment by Eirik Mikkelsen on September 1, 2012 at 11:23am I'm still waiting for mine, ordered in July and with some luck I will receive it in October. I'm hoping it is powerful enough to do something with the Kinect sensor, perhaps indoor quad navigation / obstacle avoidance will be possible?
Comment by Jack Crossfire on September 1, 2012 at 3:06pm I can produce a computer for $1, but no-one will receive their order until Oct 2150. Will give speeches for a fee.
Comment by Matt on September 1, 2012 at 5:20pm At 30-45 seconds, that was the fastest shipping of a Raspberry Pi. Ever.
Comment by eduardo on September 2, 2012 at 5:43pm Interessante como tem gente que compra as coisas sem nem mesmo ter conhecimento para poder usar as coisas .
Comment by PeteD on September 2, 2012 at 7:38pm Rpi is great, I've got two now. One is setup as a NAS at a remote location acting as my offsite backup solution. The other one is connected to my home LAN running a webcam as a rudimentary security system, some web data mining and ddns client.
I wouldn't know much about the multimedia applications, i've never connected a monitor to either of them.
Comment by Artem Grigoryev on September 4, 2012 at 5:05am "They come in pints? I'm getting one"
I grew up messing around on ZX Spectrum. I think it is terrific idea! There is no way my kids would get that close and personal starting with a PC. Besides, I'm sure I can find a bunch of applications for this hardware for my work and personal projects. Thanks for the video.
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