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Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton: How We're Turning Everyone Into DIY Hackers
redletterdave writes "Eben Upton is the CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's trading company, where he oversees production and sales of the Raspberry Pi. In a lengthy interview with ReadWrite, Upton shares how he invented Raspberry Pi, and what's coming next for the $35 microcomputer. Quoting: 'There's a big difference between [just] making a platform like Raspberry Pi available and offering support for it. I think if you just make it available, you'll find one percent of eight-year-olds will be the one percent who love that sort of thing and will get into it, regardless of how much or how little support you give them. ... [S]ince we can afford to pay for the development of educational material, we can afford to advocate for good training for teachers throughout this. There's an opportunity to get more than one percent. There's an opportunity to reach the bright kids who don't quite have the natural inclination to personally tackle complicated technical tasks. If you give them good teaching and compelling material that's relevant and interesting to them, you can reach ten percent, twenty percent, fifty percent, many more. We look back to the 1980s as this golden era [of learning to program], and in practice, only a very few percent of people were learning to program to any great degree. ... I think the real opportunity for us now, because we can intervene on the material and teacher training levels, we can potentially blow past where we were in the 1980s.'"
It's not the thing that matters. There are faster, cheaper boards than the Pi. But the community, with examples and workarounds so that the changes are you don't have to beat a path, but just hit google.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
There was a time I would have jumped at playing with a Pi, and I did take a look into using it as a media device like he mentions in the article. I looked at what it was capable of and what I'd have to do to get it to do what I wanted vs. building a media PC around XBMC... and bought a Roku instead. I just couldn't be bothered. I still love tinkering with stuff programming-wise, but I've completely lost my ambition to tinker with hardware. Am I just old, or what?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
OMG that's so witty. I see what you did. You took the name of an well known, unbelievably beautiful model and equated it with someone attached to the story with an identical name. At first, I was like... holy crap, did he just do something THAT EDGY, and then I thought it must have been a mistake because, ya know, who would have ever done such an unimaginably creative thing. But then, I look again; AND YOU TOTALLY DID!
Let me tell you, that was not a waste of time my friend. I will share this humorous anecdote with people for years to come. Take a bow sir.
Arduino is just a microcontroller with some IO ports, PI is a full blown computer that runs Linux.
I had always understood that the rasperry pi qualified as a nanocomputer... a computer that is approximately the same size as a credit card.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
any relation to Kate Upton? Just wondering.
Slashdot also phones home every time you close a comment page.
Get a basic 15.6" $299 laptop with Intel HD Graphics. Install a Linux distro. Start hacking.
For the price you get much more powerful machine than the R-Pi, and you have a screen and input devices included.
I don't want a $35 computer. I want a $10 computer, or I'll just keep using my chips instead. Everyone a DIY hacker my ass. More like everyone a DIY pipe dreamer with a little less money. Everyone I know who has bought an Arduino, with one exception, has told me it's "sitting at home and I've done nothing with it".
but I've completely lost my ambition to tinker with hardware. Am I just old, or what?
As a kid I did far more tinkering with things than I do now. Part of this is because I have a family now, but another big reason is that I am simply far more productive at my core skills. I can do professional level work in my spare time with software related tasks, so tinkering in other domains holds less of a draw. I could either write some piece of software that may get used in the open source community or perhaps even sold as a product, or I could tinker with some robotics that isn't of much better quality than what some high school students could do.
It is an easy choice for me, even if part of me would like to branch out a little bit more.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
[S]ince we can afford to pay for the development of educational material, we can afford to advocate for good training for teachers throughout this.
I don't think "DIY" means what they think it means.
I think the real opportunity for us now, because we can intervene on the material and teacher training levels, we can potentially blow past where we were in the 1980s.'"
No, DIY would be writing your own materials and training and students finding or becoming their own teachers.
There's an opportunity to reach the bright kids who don't quite have the natural inclination to personally tackle complicated technical tasks.
If you give them good teaching and compelling material that's relevant and interesting to them,
Then it's not really DIY anymore, it's just a top-down system.
I can't wait for the next generation to grow up and when the space robots are invading, they will draft the "DIY Act" to protect us.
Who would be against DIY?
You're either with us or with the space robots I'm afraid.
Eben Upton: How we're cashing in on tricking people into thinking they'll become DIY hackers and have an easy time learning about programming with the Raspberry PI.
...and then all the 1%ers, 8 year old or 60, will move on to something more challenging.