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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
Learning Linux on a RaspberryPi is like learning about cars by working on a lawnmower.
That's how I did it... started with two stroke engines and worked my way up to four stroke engines.
Actually, I started with a suspended tin can with two angled holes in it, some water, and a heat source. After understanding the steam engine and its drive train, the move to a two-stroke engine with spark plugs didn't take much work; then I got to learn about throttles, priming, flow control, etc.
After mastering these bits, four stroke engines were much less of a mystery. Plus, I was able to build go karts well before I knew the details of the four stroke engine :)
I think this is precisely the point they're trying to make with the Pi.
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