Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Four Years of Raspberry Pi”.
Hi, i’m alistair allen with make here at makercon, talking to evan upton, the founder of raspberry pi morning, good to be here excellent, so you’re just giving your talk and you talked about how the raspberry pi started out and how it was a response to the the Drop in applications to study ces at cambridge yeah, so so this was really weird for us about about 10 years ago, we found ourselves singing in cambridge, which thinks of it. So i think, with good reason, as being kind of the premier institution for doing computer science and engineering in the uk um and looking around and struggling to find enough 17 and 18 year olds, who wanted to come to our university to study computer science yeah. So um the the applications have recovered since then yeah, so applications have actually now recovered uh from they fell from about 500 in the height of the dot com boom to maybe 200 in 2008, they’ve, now rebounded to six or seven hundred um. As i said in my talk, i really want to claim all the credit for that i think.
What’S actually happened is a kind of a broad coalition of organizations who are interested in stem education, also the broader kind of make a movement. This broader trend towards young people, thinking that it’s a cool thing to do, to try and go out and build stuff, has really given us back that supply of talented teenagers that we have that we last saw in the 1980s. That’S really awesome, and you said that the success of the raspberry pi has let you do things that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do.
You want to talk about that briefly yeah. The idea was raspberry pi yeah. We were just trying to reboot we’re trying to solve a very local little problem right.
We we thought if we’d get a thousand raspberry pi’s in the hands of the right thousand kids, then we’d be we’d, be set. We’D. Have our extra few hundred applicants a year? Um, what the success of raspberry pi and the the fact we’ve been able to make make and sell raspberry pi profitably has done.
Is it’s given us access to a source of revenue that we’ve then been able to reinvest because we’re a charity? None of that money comes out in ferraris for me, um and uh, all or tesla’s, but um. That’S given us the source of revenue. We’Ve been able to invest in things like educational resources, so we’re now quite a large as an organization, a large producer of free, um educational resources in the maker area. Um, we’ve also been able to invest in things like teacher training and even things like you know, government relations.
You know we, you know, have enough money, that we have time to go and talk to government and really the uk government and other governments and really try and explain to them. Why why we had a problem, why we have a problem and what they should be doing to try and fix it? Okay and one of the things you talked about quite extensively, uh was the onshoring of production, the the pulling the raspberry pi out of china and making it in south wales. I i thought that was a really interesting point. You want to talk about that yeah.
We um, like everybody else when we started maybe trying to make a cheap thing. We thought let’s go, make it in shenzhen great realization for us is we can make it more cheaply. We build raspberry pi in the uk and we don’t build it in uk because we’re nice guys. We build the uk because we’re cheapskates um. It is a cheaper place to build for a low touch product like raspberry, pi uh, and i think a lot of other products in that kind of maker kind of make a pro kind of area.
Qualifiers low touch they’re, often bare pcb assemblies without a case, not not not a lot of you. There isn’t 10 minutes of assembling tiny fiddly screws to put a raspberry, pi together, um, i think pretty much every product in that space. If you’re prepared to do the work uh, if you’re prepared to do the optimization work on the design to make it suitable for manufacturer, if you just if you just take a device, that’s been designed to be built in an area with low labor costs, and you Bring that device to that product and that production process you bring those to the west.
You bring those to a high labor cost economy. You are going to lose money, but it’s almost always possible to take your product redesign it and redesign the production process uh generally. For more automation, uh, so that you can make it not just at the same price in the west now but more cheaply. That’S really interesting! So was there anything in particular in raspberry pi that you had to re-engineer when you moved it back on shore into the uk um, there was a lot of um. There was a lot of work in terms of uh.
A lot of it, i would say, is test engineering um. So the majority of the touch in raspberry pi and the traditional raspberry pi production process was around uh tests. So take a raspberry pi off the end of the line.
You know break it out of this panel connect stuff up to it. Uh manually run a test program on it check the output on the screen. You know tick, a box and put it and tick a box and pack it now what’s happened.
What you’ve seen happen over the last two and a half years that we’ve been building raspberry pi in the uk is steadily more and more and more automation. Generally, what we’ve done is we’ve taken the savings to that automation and we’ve invested them back in the product. So what you saw us do is, you saw us, go from two five, six meg to five twelve negative memory.
You saw us go from two usb ports to four usb ports and then recently, obviously, you’ve seen raspberry pi, two uh, and so all of those are really a result of us going and um going and while maintaining about the same production cost be able to pack More and more and more stuff into the bill of materials. Okay, that’s really awesome um, so the raspberry pi has really become quite ubiquitous. It’S one of the the mainstays of the maker movement and, of course, that wasn’t original intention.
Obviously, but it’s pretty much everywhere, including the international space station, now you’re about to send one into space yeah we are. We are most of the way through so um uh um dave hoeness from the uh. The foundation and jonathan bell from raspberry pi training from the engineering organization have spent the last six months slogging through the process of getting raspberry pi qualified to fly the international space station. Obviously, the iss is the single most expensive thing mankind has ever built. They are understandably nervous about letting guys like us, stick a thing in it in case it makes a hole in it or you know, or worse um, and so there’s a there’s, a flight approvals process. We are now almost all the way through the flight approvals process and we’ve over the last couple of months been running a competition for school children in the uk to suggest either ideas for experiments that they want.
Um uh tim peake, uk user astronaut, tim peake uh to run with the raspberry pi or in the case of secondary school students, actually writing the code. That’S going to run on the pi in space. That’S absolutely awesome. I saw the uh the case. Design was released today on the block. Oh, it’s fantastic, yeah, there’s some kind of amazing kind of steampunk thing.
You know it’s got these wonderful uh. It’S got um uh, the um, the the sense hat, which is the the you know the the the sensor package that um kids have access to. You know they write their programs against.
It has a little joystick on it, but obviously you can’t get that little joystick out uh somewhere, where the asteroid can touch it. So what we have instead is the world’s most steampunk d-pad, which consists of these four giant clicky buttons, that you can click, click, click, click and then two or yeah a b and d-pad um, so so yeah. We want to make it. So if you put the konami code in maybe you know, then you get it’ll do something interesting, something hopefully not too dangerous.
That’S absolutely awesome. Thanks for talking to us thanks very much .