Moments before Amy Mather is due to give the closing presentation at the Raspberry Jamboree being held in Manchester, the creator of the computer which inspired her talk faces a fresh challenge.

Pete Lomas has created a credit-card-sized micro-controller that sells for £16, but his current problem can't be solved with a soldering iron: he needs to figure out where Mather should stand so she can use her computer while still visible to the audience.

Mather -- who goes by the Twitter handle @MiniGirlGeek -- is just 13 and not tall enough to be seen when standing behind the podium. "I'm here to talk to you about my game of life on a Pi -- a Raspberry Pi controls an Arduino which lights up the LED Matrix," says Mather. She is standing to the right of the podium holding the contraption she has made in front of the web camera in her laptop so it shows up on the screens either side of the stage. iPhones, iPads and Android devices are fine, she says, but what interests her about programming the open-source Raspberry Pi computer is the ability to get it to do what she wants it to do.


Greg White

Lomas, like nearly everyone else in the audience, sits transfixed. Creations such as Mather's are what he had hoped to see when he was designing an affordable computer to inspire a new generation to code. Mather's physics teacher, Steve Pearce, maintains that the Raspberry Pi is having a significant impact on the educational curriculum. "Lots of kids have access to technology at home but don't necessarily have it made small and cheaply enough to play with without fear of doing any harm," he explains.

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Mather says: "There's a lot you can do with technology but most people only see the user-friendly side of it. If you get people into coding and show them it's not scary, you'll find people who are good at it. And if they're good at it, you can code a better future."

Devised, designed and now built in the UK, the Raspberry Pi is a global success story. Envisaged as a niche educational product, its creators hoped it might reach sales of 10,000 units. In fact, it sold a million before its first anniversary in February. Though created to teach kids about coding, such is its openness that it has been used -- among other things -- to operate a tweeting toy chicken, create a cocktail-pouring robot, and send pictures of a mini Tardis from the edge of space.


The Raspberry Pi may not be slick, but it has managed to stir something not seen in British computing for a generation: it has inspired a culture of making things -- not just experiencing things -- with computers.

It's a misty, grey Sunday in March as Wired arrives at Raspberry Pi's new headquarters in Cambridge. The office itself looks to be in mid-hack: wires hang from the ceiling and the detritus of inventive thought -- cables, a camera, chocolates, a wind-up robot -- cover the desks. Although it's the weekend, the office is teeming with activity: the head of hardware engineering is busy, as is the head of software. The latter, Gordon Hollingworth, who recently joined from chip-maker Broadcom, is making coffee.

The head of educational development, who has been part of the team for two weeks, walks in to the office, and executive director and founding trustee Eben Upton arrives, along with the head of communications, his wife Liz. Even Paul Beech, who designed the Raspberry Pi logo, is here -- and he lives in Sheffield. The team is together to mark the first anniversary of the launch of the Pi and to prepare for an important meeting with an unnamed international technology company the following day.

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Last to arrive is entrepreneur, angel investor and computer-science professor Jack Lang. Upton and Lang were both part of the team that came up with the idea for Raspberry Pi at Cambridge University. As the computer is open-source, nobody likes to take too much direct credit, but Lang's role is acknowledged as being formative. In person, he exudes a Jedi-like calm.


Greg White

The malleable nature of the Raspberry Pi has galvanised hackers and hobbyists. It is a starting point, imbued with possibility.

What to do with it is up to its owner. Its fans include Google's Eric Schmidt, who criticised the UK's education system for falling behind in computer science during his MacTaggart lecture at the 2011 Edinburgh TV Festival. In late January, Google announced it was giving the Raspberry Pi Foundation a grant worth an estimated £670,000 to put 15,000 of the devices into UK schools and help develop educational material to go with the technology.

At the moment, however, the heating in the office isn't working.

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Building services apparently don't cater to charitable foundations working all hours to change the world. To add to this, a technician from the telephone company mistakenly hooked up the office's broadband connection next door. Thanks to Hollingworth, though, the internet is up and running. This is, after all, a group that knows a little about achieving remarkable feats with the tools at hand.

Like most useful inventions, the Raspberry Pi was inspired by a problem in need of a solution. "We were worried that the number of people who wanted to read computer science at Cambridge [University] was dropping -- by 50 percent within the last ten years. And the quality of people we were getting wasn't as good as they used to be," Lang says.

Lang is chairman of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and one of its six founding trustees. A generation earlier, he played a role in another unlikely success story, the development of the BBC Micro computer at Cambridge-based firm Acorn. The device came about because the BBC was planning a new TV series on computing and wanted something people could practise on at home or in schools.

Acorn and rival computer company Sinclair, also based in Cambridge, competed for the bid. The odds were stacked against Acorn, which had very little time to adapt its new "Proton" computer to meet BBC specifications, but it ultimately triumphed. "We estimated that we'd sell 12,000 machines to go with the programme. We sold 1.5 million," remembers Steve Furber, who led the hardware design. "Nobody saw how large this wave of interest was going to be. One of the key roles of the BBC Micro was that it introduced computers into most UK schools."

Unlike the Pi, the BBC Micro was encased in a unit that included a keyboard; like the Pi, it needed to be plugged into a television set. "The BBC Micro was pivotal for a lot of us growing up in the 80s," says Upton, the Raspberry Pi's energetic evangelist. "It was a typical 80s machine, it had a 32k RAM and a built-in copy of Basic. You'd turn it on and it goes 'b-beep' and then the very first thing you could do was program. So you could write that two-line program '10 I am the best 20 GO TO 10', and then type

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'run' and it would fill the screen up with 'I am the best'."

The success of that computer in UK schools meant that by the time Upton applied to study computer science at Cambridge in the mid-90s, the competition was intense.

Greg White

A decade later he was interviewing potential undergraduates as a director of studies in computer science. It was then that Upton, Lang and a number of others at Cambridge realised something needed to be done. "Kids these days download, they don't program," Lang says. "They need a toolkit and a curious grandmother -- someone to say, 'That's nice dear, show me more.'" "People are just using their computers as devices to consume stuff that a small and shrinking pool of other people have developed," agrees Upton. The idea was hatched to create a BBC Micro for this new era.

In 2006, Upton produced a conceptual prototype of a single-board computer (SBC). It looked a little like an Arduino, which was probably the best-known example of a programmable SBC prior to the Pi. Still, it was unwieldy and fell far short of the team's ambitions.

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In September 2008, a chance meeting in London would usher the plan into a new phase.

Cambridge computer-science professor Alan Mycroft had travelled down to the capital for Imperial College's Research Day. There he bumped into Pete Lomas, cofounder of Norcott Technologies, an electronics design consultancy based in Cheshire. Lomas, the son of an electrician from Salford, built his first computer in 1977.

Following the event, the academic and engineer had a chat as they strolled through Hyde Park. Mycroft mentioned Upton's effort to build a computer board to help educate the new crop of computer-science undergraduates on basic problem solving.

Lomas, who'd witnessed the impact of this same problem within industry, felt compelled to pitch in. "I thought, that's a really cool idea -- I tell you what, I'll help with the engineering," recalls Lomas. He had a workshop -- he could make the computer himself.

Lomas is the only one of Raspberry Pi Foundation's six trustees who does not live in Cambridge; although set apart geographically, philosophically he's of like mind. Lomas favours brain power over computer programs that create circuit-board layouts. Printed circuit boards, he says, are "a thing of beauty".

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The brief presented formidable challenges: the computer would only have the desired impact with students if it hit a price point in the region of £15 to £23, but nor could it skimp on functionality. "We couldn't do something like the BBC Micro. We needed much better graphics because all of these kids have got iPads, iPhones, Xboxes, and at some level you have to compete with that to get them interested," Lomas says. "It needed to have all the attributes of a computer. An input.

An output. [Connections for] your keyboard and your mouse. The Ethernet connection. Some storage," he explains. "The design of the board was just like a thousand little decisions."

At one point, Lomas suggested removing the Ethernet connection.

Sheepishly, he acknowledges that if he'd been successful in this, it would have pre-empted many of the projects Raspberry Pi is being used for today, impacting on its popularity. "We had several stumblings when we were trying to create a design that would give us any hope of getting to the price point," he says. "You took a processor chip. By the time you'd got a power-management unit, you'd got all the interface bits you needed.

You put the memory separately. It was just getting too complicated and the cost was going up and up and up."

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The original prototype, built in Lomas's shop in north-west England, would have cost somewhere around £75 to produce. So, a nonstarter for the project.

Greg White

"It wasn't until we got access to the BCM2835 (Broadcom microchip), which was sufficiently integrated, that we could build essentially a three-chip solution," he says.

The team that designed the chip included Eben Upton, who had left his post at Cambridge to join Broadcom.

The BCM2835 was designed for a Nokia smartphone, and also went into a Roku internet streaming device. It had everything needed to make the Raspberry Pi work, except the ability to port open-source software. Upton tweaked it accordingly, putting technology from the Cambridge firm ARM on to the chip. Now it would run Linux. Lomas had his software. Upton also convinced his employer that the fledgling Raspberry Pi charitable foundation should be able to purchase the BCM2835 at a discount despite initial sales expectations of 10,000.

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Getting the Raspberry Pi into production would take money. Upton says the foundation first tried to obtain a loan through the East of England Development Agency. "We did a proposal and it was bounced, as there is no market for this product," he recalls, now sitting in an Italian restaurant down the hill from the office. An attempt to win support from the government loan-guarantee scheme was no more successful.

Upton, Lang and another founding trustee of the foundation, David Braben, all put in money but it still wasn't enough.

Upton asked his parents for help, with the promise that he'd buy them a steak dinner if the project was a success. Again, Upton came away with what he needed. Altogether they raised £150,000. "What Jack and a few of us did in terms of putting our own money in was a fairly conventional thing to do if you are expecting to see a return," Upton says. "It's more unusual when you are guaranteed that the best you're going to see is your money back."

So what's his motivation? "I owe an awful lot to having owned a BBC Micro. I wouldn't have met Liz," Upton explains. "I was introduced to her through my friend Alex, who I knew because we were both computer programmers.

I've been able to afford a house and a nice life. I have a good job at Broadcom because I learned to program when I was ten."

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Nearly all the money the group cobbled together went into inventory, which was stored in Lang's garage. "We had no manufacturing storage," Upton recalls. Worse still, the foundation was unclear about how to get the boards manufactured after its initial UK arrangement fell through. A Broadcom sales rep in Taipei had caught wind of what his colleagues in Britain were trying to accomplish and offered to help.

Greg White

"He found us the Egoman factory [an electronics production and assembly facility in Shenzen, China]," Upton says. "They gave us a quote and it was a great quote. We could actually make a profit, but we had to trust this guy we'd never met."

Prohibited from shipping chips directly to the plant in Shenzhen, the foundation had to send the Pi's parts to a forwarding agent in Hong Kong. The address was inside an apartment building. "We sent about $50,000 (£30,000) in chips and $50,000 in cash to this apartment -- we wired the cash," Upton says, with a wince.

This was the first week of January 2012 and the first Pi shipment was promised to consumers within weeks. When they didn't arrive, Upton tried to stay calm. It was Chinese New Year after all. The projections had been wildly optimistic. Still, there was a lot riding on the honesty and ability of strangers halfway around the world. In March, the first box of ten Raspberry Pis turned up. But there was a serious problem: the network jack didn't work. "They'd substituted our integrated jack with a dumb jack, a jack which was just a connector. We were like, 'Oh dear, this is not good,'" Upton says.

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By this time, the foundation had stolen a page from the playbook of ARM, the Cambridge chip design company that grew out of computer maker Acorn. The small firm has emerged as a global leader in chip design, especially for mobile devices, partly because it does not produce chips itself: it licenses its designs to a range of companies including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Sony and, of course, Raspberry Pi. The founding trustees realised that they had achieved what they could on their own; by licensing the design of the Raspberry Pi they would not be bound by the same financial constraints and the product could scale much more rapidly.

Greg White

Raspberry Pi signed up two licensees on the same day -- Premier Farnell, an electronics manufacturer and distributor, and RS Components, another distributor. After the initial batch of Pis was found flawed, these partners quickly sourced new jacks.

Finally, on 20 March, a DHL van pulled up to Lang's Cambridge home. The driver unloaded a pallet containing 1,950 Raspberry Pis into the same garage that had housed many of their components just months earlier. "They come in boxes of 50. There were 39 boxes. I opened the first box, took one out. Took it into Jack's living-room and booted it. It worked," says Upton, still looking relieved. "We took another one and booted it and it worked. We booted five of them, randomly chosen off the pallet, and they all worked. I looked at Jack and said, 'We made a computer company'."

In May 2011, the BBC's technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, had uploaded a YouTube video interview with the foundation's David Braben. The Pi team had been pestering the BBC to allow them to call the device the BBC Nano, with no success. Cellan-Jones, however, was impressed with the concept and shot a short clip using his mobile. The Pi, at the time, was just the size of a USB stick.

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Posted on a Thursday afternoon, the clip had been viewed by 400,000 people by Monday morning. And the numbers kept creeping up.

At a recent PyCon event in Santa Clara, California, Upton told the crowd this was an 'Oh shit!' moment. Suddenly, the focus shifted from how to create an inexpensive credit-card-sized computer to how to keep up with demand. That demand isn't showing signs of abating.

Raspberry Pi's open-source architecture means it's being used in ways that the team behind it never envisaged. It has been hacked to become an iPhone-operated garage-door opener. A professor at Manchester University has put a Raspberry Pi inside a bird box, taking photos and sending tweets when birds enter. There's a microbrewery management system called BrewPi (apparently, lots of Pi enthusiasts enjoy beer) and a Pi-powered cocktail-dispensing robot called Bartendro. "The community is such an important part of Raspberry Pi.

They wouldn't be as popular as they are with schools, with parents, with kids if we didn't have this grass-roots support," says Liz Upton, who runs the Raspberry Pi Foundation's blog and Twitter account (@Raspberry_Pi). She says it was online feedback that provided the impetus for the development of a camera that easily slots into the Raspberry Pi.

And other businesses have begun to form around the Raspberry Pi.

Sheffield-based graphic designer Paul Beech, who won a competition to design the computer's logo, and his business partner Jon Williamson have started making cases for the Raspberry Pi in rainbow colours. They called it the PiBow. After being featured on the Raspberry Pi blog, their company, Pimoroni, now has five laser cutters working around the clock in what was an abandoned storage facility used for steel springs. "This is helping people to get back into doing stuff,"

Beech says. Pimoroni also staged a Kickstarter campaign to create Picade, an arcade-style cabinet for Raspberry Pi (it currently has £74,000 in pledges).

Beech is not alone in believing that the Raspberry Pi has great potential to spur new business opportunities, but what of the Pi's original aim?

Greg White

"We've yet to see what impact it can have," says Clare Sutcliffe, founder of Code Club, a UK network of volunteers that runs after-school computer training courses for nine- to 11-year-olds, which will benefit from the Google donation.

Raspberry Pis may be great fun for older hobbyists, but the device was built to address a pressing problem within the education system. On that front, it's still early days, warns Sutcliffe. "We have to be very careful not to send these pieces of machinery out and just expect people to know how to use them, because it's not quite as simple as everybody makes out," she says. "A lot of people think they're the saviour of British computing, and I think it's dangerous to say that."

Sutcliffe says volunteers will be given the choice whether or not to work with Raspberry Pis, but she's confident that the club will support the initiative once proper training manuals are available.

Back at Raspberry Pi's headquarters, the foundation's new director of educational development, Clive Beale, declares that helping teachers learn how to use Raspberry Pi is a priority. "The worst thing I can imagine is for these to go into a school and end up in a stockroom," he says.

Greg White

In August 2012, production for the Raspberry Pi began in the town of Pencoed in Wales. As of mid-March 2013, Premier Farnell had transitioned all of its production to Wales. Raspberry Pi's other licensee, RS Components, is in the process of moving production across and should complete in the summer. "After we'd been running for about a month, we were approached by Sony, via a third party. What we discovered at the end of the quoting process was that they could build at the same price in South Wales," Upton says, noting that much of the assembly is done by robots. "We're not building it in the UK for patriotic reasons. We're building it in the UK because it makes economic sense." "I had always wanted to build it in the UK," Lomas says. "I believe the UK does have an industry in terms of electronics.

People say it's dead, it's gone. It's not. It's here. It's vibrant."

As for the question about when Raspberry Pi will achieve its ambitious educational objectives, Upton is optimistic, but urges patience. "Let's say kids start [learning to code] at ten.


You've got an 11-year pipeline," he says. "In the early 1990s we stopped filling up the pipeline, and then in the first half of the last decade we saw a crash in numbers eight years later. The reason why we're going to have to wait before we have impact is that we have to refill the pipeline. You know, start pouring ten-year-old kids into this pipeline again."

Still, it's an encouraging start. "Raspberry Pi has generated the best buzz about computers in schools since 30 years ago," according to Furber, who helped build the BBC Micro.

Now, according to Lang, it's merely a matter of "hanging on to the tail of a tiger".