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On February 29, 2012, the Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC) came out and set a record of 100,000 units on its first day of sale. Over the past decade, manufacturers, professional engineers, and hobbyists have all benefited from the Raspberry Pi's many creative offerings, from the Model B to the low-cost Pico Pi. The Raspberry Pi, which has just passed its 10th birthday, has long since faded away from the cheap computer teaching aids of the past, and has become the world's leading microcomputer brand in the industry.
Why is it called "Raspberry Pi"?
In a sense, the name "raspberry" is actually very simple, because people were using various fruits to name computers and companies.
Among the "fruits", the most famous one is the "apple".
But there are also such as apricot (Apricot), acorn (Acorn).
Acorn is the company that makes the BBC Micro, and that computer is one of the things that inspired co-founder and CEO Eben Upton to develop the Raspberry Pi.
In addition to that, Upton said the name is an interesting reference to the term "blowing a raspberry" (to the effect of bald purring and making a mocking sound).
As for "Pi", is the first reaction in your mind 3.14159265358979323846...
Yes, the Pi in the name is a tribute to the magical irrational number "π", and also represents the programming language "Python" used for development.
Of course, "Raspberry Pi" can also be understood as a pun on "Raspberry Pie", so naturally there is also a delicious "Raspberry Pi".
In a recent interview, Upton joked: "Actually, I love eating them. It's a very sensible name because it's a good pie and it's not used yet.
Pi's life
In fact, the history of the Raspberry Pi started in 2006.
The world of technology was very different then, Google was not long in popularity, Facebook was a novelty, and Twitter was just born.
And everything about the Raspberry Pi started with a young engineer at Broadcom.
In May 2011, the Raspberry Pi team showed the prototype for the first time.
On July 24, 2011, the Raspberry Pi community was opened with the first official blog post.
In November and December 2011, the prototype of the Raspberry Pi underwent two large-scale changes to its design and was finally finalized.
In 2011, some alpha and beta versions that eventually became the first Raspberry Pi boards were released to a closed user base.
In January 2012, the first Raspberry Pi board - Type B (yes, Type B came before Type A) was revealed, but only 10 boards were sold on eBay.
On February 29, 2012, the Model B went on sale to the public.
According to the recollection of a British tech nerd, he was waiting to place an order in the online store at 6 o'clock in the morning. And he seems to be a lot of enthusiasts, because the two online stores that sold the Raspberry Pi collapsed due to overloaded traffic not long after.
In March 2012, the Raspberry Pi team announced on the blog that a batch of faulty products was sent from a Chinese foundry. There are redundant parts that do not meet the design, and the initial order shipment may be affected.
At the end of March 2012, the Raspberry Pi team announced that the Chinese foundry sent qualified supplements, and the initial release gap was filled.
"We realized at the outset that the market reaction was going to be bigger than expected," Upton said. "Our initial idea was to make 1,000 or 10,000 units or something like that... We ordered a few thousand units from the first contract manufacturer in China."
"Around Christmas 2011, when we got our first beta products, we put a Debian-based OS online...it got 50,000 downloads right away, and all the downloaders could do was QEMU Run it in the simulator (there is a QEMU simulation system with a configuration similar to the Raspberry Pi)."
"50,000 people downloaded this very primitive OS for machines they couldn't buy!" Upton exclaimed.
It was then that the founding team realized that customer demand for Raspberry Pis would be much higher than 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 units.
In May 2012, the first Raspberry Pi with a camera module was successfully developed.
The world's first photo taken by a Raspberry Pi, taken by a developer during testing
In September 2012, Raspberry Pi production was moved to Sony Europe's facilities in the UK.
In May and September 2012, the Raspberry Pi began to be shipped to order, and the first batch of products were sent to the technology product launch venues in New York and the West Coast Bay Area.
Upton's photo at the West Coast Technology Developers Conference. Raspberry Pi co-founder and his wife Liz Upton said at the time that the installation art in the office and the whole background
In October 2012, the memory capacity of the Raspberry Pi B was expanded to 512MB.
At the end of November 2012, samples of the Raspberry Pi Model A, whose price was reduced to $25, were successfully produced. The final iterations of the original Raspberry Pi computers, the Pi 1 Model A+ and B+, are still available today.
Time changes, different volumes of the same computing power equipment in different years
A British tech house sighed that this microcomputer, which looks more like a motherboard, is not without rivals on the market.
But there is really no competing product that has been relentlessly updating the operating system for 10 years like the Raspberry Pi, ensuring that new and old users can always use even the earliest first-generation products
About 46 million Raspberry Pis have been produced so far, although it's a little difficult to get one in 2022 because of the supply chain crisis.
Now, the Raspberry Pi also makes and designs its own chips and microcontrollers, opening up a whole new range of potential applications.
Raspberry Pi chip
Raspberry Pi and RISC-V
A few months ago, Mathias Claussen, senior engineer at Elektor, asked Upton about your choice of ARM architecture for the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico. But two years ago, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also became a member of the RISC-V Foundation. Why?
Upton replied: We are members of the RISC-V Foundation, but everything we do is to help. RISC-V takes a long time to make an impact. It's not enough to just build the architecture and have an ISA. You must also have licensable high-quality cores within a very wide performance envelope.
If you look at ARM, their cores have been upgraded from M0+ to Cortex 710 and Cortex X2, still basically the same chip size as we use in Pico, and even the original ARM 1 from the 1980s. While Intel processors are extremely large in size and power consumption, Arm's cores cover all the space for high performance and low power consumption. Therefore, ARM is a very mature ecosystem in terms of hardware and a very mature system in terms of software.
Why are we a member of the RISC-V Foundation? I think RISC-V has an opportunity in the microcontroller space, and we have ideas on how it can be successful. I think we've been keen to share these things in the RISC-V standardization process. So this has nothing to do with building a RISC-V based Raspberry Pi or a RISC-V based RP2040 or Pico. It's a very, very long-term investment for us, we're involved, and great things are happening, but it's going to take time.
How to make a Raspberry Pi?
Upton grew up with the BBC Micro: one of two popular computers designed in Cambridge in the 1980s (the second was the Sinclair Spectrum), which taught a whole generation of British computer enthusiasts how to code.
Micro not only inspired Upton's love of programming, but made him a lover of low-cost computers.
But at £350, it's still too expensive for a student.
To this end, Upton came up with the idea of making a "replacement" of his own. His goal was to be ten times cheaper than the BBC Micro, so that ten times as many students could use it.
However, doing this requires designing low-cost, high-performance computers that require expertise in technology, industry trends, education, and manufacturing.
In the beginning, the Raspberry Pi was a purely personal project. Upton used his evenings and weekends off for development at the time.
Since then, Upton has gradually organized a group of professors Robert Mullins and Alan Mycroft from the Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, Cambridge serial entrepreneur and business angel investor Jack Lang, and other Cambridge computer scientists, engineers and manufacturing entrepreneurs team.
Various prototypes of the Raspberry Pi before the launch of the Raspberry Pi on display in the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory
For the Raspberry Pi, there are four interrelated requirements that must be met:
Should be a programmable hardware.
Should be interesting: the 1980s crowd may have become interested in computers because of games, but the nature of computers at the time meant that many of them were exposed to programming almost by accident. The Raspberry Pi has to be equally fun and do what young people expect from a PC.
The price should be low enough: The team settled on a starting price of $25, in part because it's about the cost of a textbook, and it's low enough that most families can afford it and that the school can subsidize the few families of students who can't .
Must be sturdy enough: Upton says we want kids to have their own Raspberry Pi, which means it has to be able to withstand being put in a bag and taken out a thousand times.
Finally, a stable, powerful and inexpensive Raspberry Pi was born in 2012.
In 2013, the Raspberry Pi won the INDEX Design Award; in 2017, it won the UK's oldest engineering innovation award, the MacRobert Award of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Some otaku joked that considering cost, adaptability, comprehension, energy consumption, and multitasking performance, the Raspberry Pi is better than his girlfriend in all indicators.
Raspberry Pi today
As the hardware itself, the Raspberry Pi family has grown considerably.
There's the Raspberry Pi Pico for just $4, and the flagship Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with up to 8GB of RAM (also available in 2GB and 4GB of RAM).
Raspberry Pi 4
In addition, there is the all-in-one computer Raspberry Pi Model 400, which has similar performance to the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and has 4GB of memory.
Raspberry Pi 400
For those looking for a smaller, less expensive board, there's also the Raspberry Pi Zero series, which integrates Bluetooth and WiFi and 512MB of SDRAM.
Right now, about 100,000 Raspberry Pis are being produced every month, but that's not nearly enough. Upton believes that real customer demand is somewhere between 1 million and 2 million units. However, due to the global shortage of chips, the Raspberry Pi is powerless to expand its production capacity.
The fire of the Raspberry Pi today is largely due to the latest Raspberry Pi 4. Upton believes that the Raspberry Pi 4 is an important milestone in the decade, because its performance has been improved by 3 times compared to the previous generation, and it has increased memory, opened up products at multiple price points, and expanded its performance. User scope.
Now, the Raspberry Pi doesn't just open the world of programming to people from all ages and backgrounds. Its adaptability, stability and low price make it ideal for application scenarios such as electric vehicles, IoT or automated assembly lines.
As a "computer", the Raspberry Pi is quite different in that even an "old antique" purchased in 2012 can still run the latest operating system in 2022.
From 2007, when Upton’s founding team started working on the Raspberry Pi, to 2022, the number of students applying for computer science at Cambridge University has grown from 200 to more than 1,600. While it's not entirely the Raspberry Pi's fault, the result still pleases Upton.
In addition to sales and the growing number of computer students, what surprised Upton was that the Raspberry Pi, originally aimed at students, has now become an important industrial device. According to the official statistics of Raspberry Pi, industrial applications account for 40% of the total sales of Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi has changed the way engineers design industrial control systems and has become a standard component of smart interfaces. Its adaptability, stability, and low price make it ideal for applications such as EV charging, IoT, and retrofitting factory machinery.
Many manufacturers have implemented industrial equipment designs with the Raspberry Pi, using digital monitoring to find faults in the production process.
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