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Milestone: The Millionth UK-Made Raspberry Pi
judgecorp writes "The millionth Raspberry Pi microcomputer has been made in the Foundation's Welsh factory. Total sales so far are 1.75 million, including the initial stock made in China." (Do you have one? If so, what are you using it for?)
People thought it would never get it off the ground. Then people thought it would never ship. Then that it would be plagued by problems and die. Then that it would never hold interest long enough to get to the point where you could get one without waiting 6 months.
There are still lots of haters, talking about how there are better “alternatives” out there (alternatives usually being 3 or 4 times the cost, impossible to get, or apples to oranges).
That said, I can order a perfectly functional unit, for the promised price, and have it here (in Canada) in about 4 days. I’ve got 5 of them now. I’d call that a huge success.
You brought something awesome into the world, and I thank you :)
Same here.
My RPi from the very first batch has been gathering dust ever since I ran into a whole bunch of power and USB issues (the USB and SD port - or is it the Ethernet and SD, I forget? - both compete for bus resources and slagging any one of them can *silently* drop packets on the other). They tried to fix it but their debugging was non-existent for so long I stopped providing helpful data. About a year later, they put out a firmware fix that basically bodges things because the hardware design can't be changed.
Couple with initial compatibility problems resulting in sending my SD card to Broadcom themselves at the request of some RPi folks and then NEVER hearing anything back, not a dicky-bird, and still having the problems on even the latest firmwares, and the whole thing ended up in the attic. You honestly can't use a device that has problems that intermittent / unpredictable under heavy load, especially when all the interesting stuff will keep it under heavy load for the majority of its runtime.
Some day I'll knock it up to be a doorbell or some other non-critical electronic project but it's really just-another-IC to me at the moment, so it's gathering dust. Keeping it purely for future nostalgia value ("I remember I spent fucking months trying to get this to work!") and the fact that selling it isn't worth it because they cost so little.
Depending on your definition, they delivered the device they promised. Trouble is, it's next-to-useless for anything non-trivial in the homebrew-gadget department and don't even get me started on their selling this to schools (I work in schools - I showed everyone, from teachers to decision-makers to techies, right at the peak of the popularity of the launch when it was featuring on the BBC. We unanimously agreed that it was a nice gadget that, if you have the knowledge to use it with the educational resources provided - which is next to none - then you don't need it and can do much more interesting things on an ordinary PC).