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Raspberry Pi Passes 10M Sales Mark (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the yay dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi has sold 10 million units -- continuing its success as the most popular British computer ever. The computer, about the same size as a credit card, was first released in 2012 and is widely used as an educational tool for programming. However, it can also be used for many practical purposes such as streaming music to several devices in a house. A new starter kit for Raspberry Pi, including a keyboard and mouse, has been released to celebrate the success. The kit also includes an SD storage card, official case, power supply, HDMI cable, mouse, keyboard and guidebook -- it costs $130 and will be available in the coming weeks. The Pi, which is manufactured in Wales, has been adopted by pupils, programmers and inventors around the world.

2 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. I got a Pi 3 recently. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I got one recently and they're frickin awesome.

    I got the official touch screen as well which is really sweet. I expect there will be a bunch of naysayers pointing out how you can get faster/cheaper things which blow the Pi away.

    Sure you can, but it's under 30 quid, more than fast enough for what I want and has an excellent user community and documentation. I don't really care about shaving 50% off something already really cheap especially when it will inevitably cost me much more time in even the short term.

    Oh also, the kernel provides access to GPIOs in /sys/class/gpio, including select() to wait for edge events. How cool is that? I never knew and that's going to save time screwing around with, well, GPIOs.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
    1. Re:I got a Pi 3 recently. by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I got one recently and they're frickin awesome.

      I got the official touch screen as well which is really sweet. I expect there will be a bunch of naysayers pointing out how you can get faster/cheaper things which blow the Pi away.

      Sure you can, but it's under 30 quid, more than fast enough for what I want and has an excellent user community and documentation. I don't really care about shaving 50% off something already really cheap especially when it will inevitably cost me much more time in even the short term.

      Oh also, the kernel provides access to GPIOs in /sys/class/gpio, including select() to wait for edge events. How cool is that? I never knew and that's going to save time screwing around with, well, GPIOs.

      For the most part I agree. Unfortunately the main reason I use the PI is simply because of the widespread community support and the avaialbility of software for it. The PI is not without flaws. For one thing the PI has no A/D converter which is a major flaw from my point of view. It also has no internal charging circuit, the CHIP 9 Dollar computer has one and that's a big plus for the CHIP. Finally I'd like a version of the PI to be available off the shelf:

      1. A) without those clunky old 40 pin strips soldered on. There are quite a few hat boards that you could mount 3-4 mm closer to the PI main board if you used machine pin header and connector strips.
      2. B) With no USB-A connectors soldered on. That way I could solder some kind of pin into the holes the where the connectors of the USB-A socket go and use a ribbon cable to connect the PI to external USB devices. That would make the job of cramming the PI into the most compact possible device enclosure much easier than if you are using big and clunky USB-A patch cables.