Raspberry Pi 10th Anniversary
Raspberry Pi celebrates its tenth anniversary with total success
On February 29, 2012, the British Foundation after the Raspberry Pi began taking orders for this revolutionary microcomputer inspired by Apple's Mac Mini.
A few hours later, as the device was celebrating the release in a pub with some nice beers, it received information from its hardware partners, Farnell and RS Components: The initial offer had been overwhelmed with 100,000 orders and they had no inventory to cover them.
An overwhelming success for the breakthrough that in these ten years has become the sales leader in the single-board mini-PC or SBC category.
Although the initial goal of the British non-profit foundation of the same name was to encourage the teaching of computer science in academia, its low cost and enormous employment elasticity made it formidably common in a number of other segments.
The original Raspberry Pi, now showing its capabilities.
It used a 700 MHz ARM11 CPU SoC coupled with 512 MB of RAM, which has been said to have real-world performance similar to a 300 MHz Pentium II with graphics capabilities close to the original Xbox.
Although it was not open hardware and the Foundation signed distribution contracts with specific companies, the truth is that anyone can become a reseller or redistributor of these boards.
The Foundation maintains control over the technology used, but its use is free at the user level.
The program that supports it is open source..
The official operating system is the Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian (with a new recent 64-bit version), although other Linuxes such as Arch Linux ARM or Pidora, the popular embedded system RISC OS 5 and even Windows 10 IoT Core are supported.
For programmers and practitioners, Python is encouraged singularly and others such as Tiny BASIC, C, Perl, and Ruby are supported.
The result of the undertaking was incredible..
In the first year, one million units were sold and since then it has not stopped growing.
In 2015, five million were sold and in 2017, fifteen million.
In its first ten years, 45 million units have been delivered.
It is the best-selling British PC in history and few models can boast of having reached such figures.
Raspberry Pi 10th Anniversary – Raspberry Pi Editions
Since the original “Raspberry Pi 1 Model A” there have been around a dozen new updates that have improved the performance of the main SoC, memory capacity and connectivity.
The most advanced is the Pi 4 model with 8 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, Broadcom BCM2711 SoC with 4 Cortex A72 cores, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, microSD and a decent collection of ports including USB Type C and A, and video output to power up to 2 4K monitors.
Aside from the optimization of the general series, the Foundation has produced other prepared editions like the Pi Zero or the Pico Mini, which consume less power and are even more affordable than the US$35 that had been held as a reference.
Another official version of interest was the Pi 400, a fully-fledged PC built in a solid keyboard-like form factor that was quite pleasing as it simplified the setup to start enjoying this advancement without assembly difficulties. In these ten years there has been no shortage of official accessories from others such as chassis, screens, cooling systems and others.
Raspberry Pi 10th Anniversary – What can you do with a Raspberry Pi?
This expansion of the ecosystem has served to increase its employment capacity and in fact today it can be used for a multitude of projects.
For programming, as a multimedia center, as a base for making basic PCs, as an anonymous router for TOR, for gaming machines, as a tablet, for robotics, for making surveillance cameras, as a universal translator, as arcade games in a minimal size, and a very long etcetera, in which a multitude of people interested in this advancement are working.
You can start with just the plate and also add what you need or get different kits that have everything you need inside.
The exact same board, chassis, case, power supply, microSD now loaded with Raspberry OS and more to make it easier for inexperienced users to get started from scratch.
The current state of the chip industry has raised costs slightly, but they remain contained for the potential they offer.
Regarding the program, the essential images to boot the official Raspberry Pi OS known to enthusiasts as Raspbian are available for download and use for free.
The Raspberry Pi Imager app is also provided, which enables the creation of the system on machines with Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems, using the microSD that you use with the Raspberry.
Although other options can be used in single-board PCs, this advancement is still Highly recommended for anyone who wants to entertain themselves and study..
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the publication, lThe Foundation has partnered with the National Museum of Computing to provide a temporary exhibition that tells the story of the Raspberry Pi.
The exhibition will open next weekend and the liturgy will will broadcast live online on March 5.