MakerS as innovaTors Chapter 1 Making Pi M ost of us spend at least part of each day using a computer tablet or smartphone These devices are designed to be as easy as possible to use We rarely have reason to peek inside to see how the computer works A Raspberry Pi computer is different You can see everything the soldering the ports and the circuit board Why would someone make a computer and show you the guts Why would people work six years and donate their own money to create a computer and then charge just 25 to 35 for it And why did the initial batch of 10,000 Raspberry Pis nicknamed RasPi sell out in less than 24 hours The story begins in 2006 at England’s University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory A group of people at Cambridge including Eben Upton Jack Lang Rob Mullins and Alan Mycroft started noticing that something had changed When many of them had applied to college in the 1990s competition to get into a computer science program was fierce Everybody seemed to come to college already knowing how 4
RaspbeRRy pi The BBC Micro was once a popular computer among beginning programmers to program in at least one language Students had often learned programming languages as a hobby on machines like the BBC Micro the Apple II or the Commodore 64 But by the time Upton and his friends had become the teachers far fewer students came to computer science school with programming experience This batch of incoming students might have built Web sites 5
MakerS as innovaTors or used basic everyday programs but many did not know how to create their own software This meant that the computer science professors had a harder time finding great incoming students They spent more college hours teaching skills that students used to have already when they arrived Why was that Maybe it was because computers had gotten a lot easier to use Maybe it was because there were so many great programs out there that people bought programs instead of writing their own Maybe kids were spending more time playing video games instead of making them But for Upton and his friends writing programs was more fun and more useful How could they get more people interested in programming They thought it would be great if someone could create a really simple inexpensive powerful computer that kids could play with and program That way parents wouldn’t worry about their kids accidentally messing up the family computer Most computer companies aren’t in the business of making really simple cheap computers They would rather make expensive computers so they can make 6
RaspbeRRy pi more money So the teammates decided they’d recruit a few experts and build one themselves They added Pete Lomas and David Braben to their team They registered as a not-for-profit organization and called themselves the Raspberry Pi Foundation Pi is both a joke pi is a number used in many mathematical formulas that is equal to about 3 14 and a reference to a programming language called Python And Raspberry Well what else goes with pie Over the next several years the teammates worked at other jobs while working to create the new computer in their free time They asked lots of questions Should the computer be able to connect to the Internet How many USB ports should it have to connect other components What should the RasPi use for a monitor Could people reuse an old TV or would they need a new monitor Where would people save their files Over and over they reminded themselves that they wanted a computer that was powerful small and above all cheap By spring 2012 the team had raised some money selling stickers with the RasPi logo on them They had also spent thousands of dollars of their own money 7
