The Raspberry Pi is an affordable, credit card sized computer that plugs into a monitor/TV and uses a keyboard and mouse. It allows people to learn how to program, whether that be in languages such as scratch or python. It is possible to create games, browse the internet, play videos and much more.  Raspberry Pi started out as a modest collaboration between a team at Cambridge University and Norcott Technologies. The original goal was to provide a response to the decline in students engaging with computer science and related STEM disciplines.  A key target was to try to reverse the trend of children becoming pure consumers rather than creators in an increasingly pre-packaged digital world. After three years of Raspberry Pi in the hands of users, and over 5 Million units sold it has been widely adopted by the maker and educational communities as a creative platform of choice.



If you want to know more about Raspberry Pi, and the uses, have a look at the other IET content.

 

Watch our short interview with Pete Lomax.



IET Scotland North Prestige Event

Recently the IET Scotland North local network organised an event in Aberdeen, where Pete Lomas who is a co-founder and trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, presented and gave demonstrations of the Raspberry Pi in action. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity that exists to promote the study of computer science and electronics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.  Pete has particular interest in embedded systems and the use of Raspberry Pi to interface and interact with the real world. Pete is a graduate of Manchester University and holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science.  Previously in his career he has been a lecturer in computer science at Manchester and from there has held a variety of roles in electronic product design and development. His current role is as Director of Engineering for Norcott Technologies a UK based electronics design and contract manufacturing company.

 

The event held in Aberdeen was a huge success with around 100 people attending, consisting of both IET members and non-members. The evening started with a reception and networking session where there were a number of demonstrations of the raspberry pi set up in which people could interact with.







The event then took a more formal presentation style in a lecture theatre at the venue where Pete presented on the background, challenges, successes and the future of the Raspberry Pi. Pete’s presentation had everyone intrigued and it was clear he was very passionate about the Raspberry Pi , which was infectious. Pete explained how he and the other co-founders met to discuss how to respond to the decline in computer science students and STEM subjects, when they decided to create a small computer. They wanted to create a platform that was low cost, that people wouldn’t mind if they damaged it. Pete explained how they designed and built a prototype, how they had to outsource the manufacturing outwith the UK in order to keep the costs to a reasonable level, how they identified a single error on the first run of boards that they managed to resolve before the first production run.  Before launch day at the end of Feb 2012 the foundations servers struggled to cope with the overwhelming response to the launch of this computer. When launch day came the websites of the two licensed manufacturers, Premier Farnell and RS components had their websites fall over due to the huge amounts of web traffic of people trying to order a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi had already been a huge success story. Pete went on to explain that due to the overwhelming response they went on to create a second version of the Raspberry Pi model B and that due to quality issues with the manufacturer they relocated the manufacturing to Sonys manufacturing facility in Wales, UK.  Since then they have now released further versions of the Raspberry Pi, the latest being the Raspberry Pi 2.

 

Petes presentation was very well received and generated a number of interesting questions at the end. I certainly felt like I should go out and get myself a Raspberry Pi and experiment with it to create something interesting. 



The event was held at the Aberdeen Business School.