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Interviews: Ask Raspberry Pi Founder and CEO Eben Upton a Question
It's been roughly five years since we last interviewed the founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd., Eben Upton. Eben currently serves as a technical director and ASIC architect for Broadcom. He founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2009 to develop and market a $25 microcomputer for education. He has also founded two successful mobile games and middleware companies, Ideaworks 3d Ltd. and Podfun Ltd., and served a Director of Studies for computer science at St. John's College, Cambridge. Ebon has agreed to take some time out of his busy schedule and answer some of your questions.
You may ask Eben as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to Eben Upton himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.)
Go on, don't be shy!
You may ask Eben as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. We'll pick the very best questions and forward them to Eben Upton himself. (Feel free to leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.)
Go on, don't be shy!
the RE'd open source VC4 firmware, once feature complete, will finally quell open source advocates dislike of your claims that the Pi was a 'fully' open source system by allowing them to run their own software at all levels of Pi operation? If so, do you foresee any changes being made by broadcom in future revisions of the VC4 that will 'intentionally' break compatibility with the initialization code or see keyed firmware signing required at some or all levels of the Pi hardware, as has happened on Intel, AMD, and a variety of other ARM SoCs?
What do you think about RISC-V?
Will each form factor get updated over time? I'm talking about the A+ and especially the Zero.
Currently, vendors are having to limit availability due to supply shortage. Is it intended that this will not be the case in the future, or is the foundation concentrating on other things?
I recall years ago researching and seeing a post, I think by a broadcom employee, suggesting it would be fairly trivial if anyone were interested to have them modify the GPU firmware to support basic signed bootloading (keys and their management under full control of the device owner of course). I wonder if anything came of that, or could possibly come sooner rather than later (hint hint).
I can't quickly find the thread, but here is boot sequence outline from stackexchange
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/8480
One question per comment, please.
Thank you for creating a such an awesome and useful little computer.
I've used Pi's to do everything from automatically watering my xmas tree to teaching a fourth grade class basic electronics to doing remote backups of my data (with a pi in my house and one far away at my buddies.)
That last operation suffers greatly from the lack of ram resources on a raspberry pi. My "pi" in the sky remote backup node has an SO-DIMM slot on the back I could stick a 8 or 16GB so-dimm in. 1-4 SATA ports so I write faster and a gigE ethernet interface.
I understand that you're under financial pressures to keep the cost down, but I see a real market for a Pi 3+.
Also, follow slashdotters... if there's a platform out there that accomplishes this that's not a proprietary NAS let me know. I've also investigated several microST motherboards but I don't want to have to deal with a "real" power supply, etc.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I own all of the major Raspberry Pi hardware versions that have been released. I love them all. I only have one wish. Faster I/O. Will the next hardware release address this? USB 3.0, 1Gbps NIC, faster SD card interface. Any one of these upgrades would be great. All of them? Would be awesome! :)
The RaspberryPi is quite famously manufactured in the UK. Is this still a long term strategy or have recent events such as the Brexit and the rise of Pi competitors forced a review of the future of manufacturing in the UK?
Will wake-on-LAN be available on the RPi platform someday?
Some of us are still waiting for a low-cost 4 GB + 4 Core embedded device with a Real-Time-Clock ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The Pi was designed as a cheap-as-chips (pun unintended) computer for classroom education. Obviously since then it's been put to a myriad of Other Uses. Which of these have struck you as the "best" or most unexpected usage outside the classroom?
The latest model is impressive, but given the plummeting cost of hardware (thank you, smartphones), what features would you like to see in The Next Pi? More/faster CPU cores, better wireless, gigabit ethernet, USB 3.0 support, ???
What are the challenges in bringing a lower power display (e-ink or otherwise) to market?
Plans for non usb based networking?
I much admire the Raspberry Pi project, philosophy and products With the luxury of perfect hindsight, what would you have done differently if you could go back in time?
Since the Pi products make computing accessible for most everyone, would it be worthwhile to develop an all-in-one PI like the One Laptop Per Child concept?
Since raspberry Pi 2, the CPU hasn't been the weakest link, but then my use of the device isn't classroom, but home server, or connected to a TV. But I was very disappointed in the improvements in the 3 as it addressed non issues.
The single USB 2.0 bus really limit things. All IO sharing ~35MB/s . Even a single USB 3.0 bus would be 10x increase. After that it's RAM. I know these are constraints based on the chips you can get cheap, but any chance of seeing an upgrade?
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
What is your "answer" for Parallela?
* Parallella: The Most Energy Efficient Supercomputer on the Planet - Ray Hightower of WisdomGroup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Raspberry Pis and most other hobbyist-SBCs are based around various ARM SoCs, but as a whole the big picture is horribly fragmented, with this board having slightly different bootup-sequence than that board, requiring board-specific steps in software, and this board having totally closed GPU and video-engine software and that board having some parts of them open, and this board supporting VDPAU or such for video-decoding and that board using OMX, cameras being only useable with specific boards, even though they share the exact same CSI-connector and so on -- how high do you value the idea of standardizing some of these things, and do you believe there will be any progress worth mentioning in the next 10 or 20 years?
Personally, I'm feeling quite apathetic about it all. I can't foresee manufacturers being willing to work together for a standard, let alone one that'd be open and freely accessible to hobbyists, and I believe that especially all the GPU and video-engine stuff will be kept under lock and key indefinitely. Part of the problem is that pretty much all of these SBCs are built around tablet-SoCs, with no SoCs specifically designed for hobbyist-use and SBCs.
Do you yourself use Raspberry Pis in your daily life and if so what for?
If I go to buy a pi in Canada the $5 will be over $20 delivered, the $25 will be over 50(before shipping), and the $35 one will be $60+(before shipping).
The exchange rate isn't that great in Canada but it is nowhere that bad. This pretty much defeats the whole $5 and put it everywhere thing. What I am asking you is to prioritize deliveries to companies that will actually charge a reasonable price. A price that includes shipping. Then they have a habit of only having the "kits" in stock. This translates to paying another 40 for a crap SD card, a crap wall wart, and a crap case.
I would love to use some zeros robots and hand them to my kids to potentially destroy. But considering it is almost cheaper to by a crap laptop on the used market in Canada than a Pi this is just silly.