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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.

11 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: 4, Informative

      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

      If they've got the USB working properly now then it's awesome. If they don't then it's useless to me. Have they got the USB working properly now?

      Depends on what you mean. I connect a 2W USB WiFi board to my PI using USB and I'm getting 150mps out of it and stream video for up to a kilometer. Other than that I mostly connect keyboards, mice, external USB drives, webcams and occasionally a USB sound card. Of course I'm not constantly plugging, un-plugging and then and re-plugin my connected devices at runtime but up until now I have had no problems.

    2. Re:I got a Pi 3 recently. by Kinwolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think you'll have to explain what you mean by "properly"

    3. Re:I got a Pi 3 recently. by chispito · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If they've got the USB working properly now then it's awesome. If they don't then it's useless to me. Have they got the USB working properly now?

      It is what it is. I'm trying to think of the very limited set of applications you must have in mind that it would be "useless" when there are so many successful projects people use them for.

      --
      The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    4. Re:I got a Pi 3 recently. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      Unfortunately the main reason I use the PI is simply because of the widespread community support and the avaialbility of software for it.

      I'm not sure why that's unfortunate. It's kind of the reason. It's not the most powerful or the cheapest, but they sell then for a long time and community support is excellent so they work with out the screw-with-it factor.

      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.

      Come to think of it that is quite an odd feature to miss on a general purpose microcontroller.

      It also has no internal charging circuit, the CHIP 9 Dollar computer has one and that's a big plus for the CHIP.

      I run mine off the mains :). The downside with a built in charging circuit is that it determins your battery type. LiPo is best for energy density, but they're subtle and quick to burst into ravenous flames. Lead Acid can be abused to hell and back, but you pay a penalty in weight. NiMH are a reasonable middle ground.

      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.

      I see your point, but having two of everything or more likely only one of the various peripheral types would lead to fragmentation which would spoil half the advantage of it.

      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.

      That's true. Well in a sane world, they'd be micro-A except that's micro-AB but micro AB to B cables don't exist.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  2. Re:10M ? by Dave+Whiteside · · Score: 2

    http://whereismypizero.com/

    --
    who where what when now?
  3. Re:What does this have to do with Windows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    You say that like it's good thing

  4. Size of a stack of 20 credit cards by Tinsoldier314 · · Score: 2

    Try putting it in your wallet, I dare you.

  5. Re:What does this have to do with Windows? by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 2

    It's a special magic version of Windows, it's been cross compiled to the non-x86 CPU, you can't install any actual Windows software on it.

    In short - its only use is as an embedded dev platform for organisations that have their head so firmly entrenched in the splenic flexure of Microsoft's colon that they cannot possibly consider using that nasty filthy commie Open Source stuff.

  6. Target market by rijrunner · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The interesting thing here is that people are complaining about how the Raspberry Pi operates when used by people who were not its primary customer when it was designed.

    When it launched, it was launched, it was done as a teaching system and it has been aimed more at replacing the arduino than PC's, where this is very cost competitive given its vastly greater capabilities.

    That is does not have all the functionality of a desktop is not surprising. That is not what it was designed for. But, the low cost is really causing people to think about the system and deploy it in very surprising ways. (We are using them at my place of business in our NOC for all our monitoring systems where more powerful systems are just overkill.)

    1. Re:Target market by jason777 · · Score: 2

      Ya, plus the commercial use. Consider companies like homeseer using it as a base for their home automation controllers. I bet they place many orders for PIs.