Schlagwort: birthday

  • Celebrating 10 years of Raspberry Pi with a new museum exhibition

    Celebrating 10 years of Raspberry Pi with a new museum exhibition

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Ten years ago, Raspberry Pi started shipping its first computers in order to inspire young people to reimagine the role of technology in their lives. What started with a low-cost, high-performance computer has grown into a movement of millions of people of all ages and backgrounds.

    A group of children and an adult have fun using Raspberry Pi hardware.

    Today, Raspberry Pi is the UK’s best-selling computer, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation is one of the world’s leading educational non-profits. Raspberry Pi computers make technology accessible to people and businesses all over the world. They are used everywhere from homes and schools to factories, offices, and shops.

    Several models of the Raspberry Pi computer.

    Visit the history of Raspberry Pi

    To help celebrate this 10-year milestone, we’ve partnered with The National Museum of Computing, located at the historic Bletchley Park, to open a new temporary exhibit dedicated to telling the story of the Raspberry Pi computer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the global community of innovators, learners, and educators we’re a part of.

    A young person programs a robot buggy built with LEGO bricks and the Raspberry Pi Build HAT.

    In the exhibit, you’ll be able to get hands-on with Raspberry Pi computers, hear the story of how Raspberry Pi came to be, and see a few of the many ways that Raspberry Pi has made an impact on the world.

    Join us for the exhibition opening

    We know that not everyone will be able to experience the exhibit in person, and so we’ll live-stream the grand opening this Saturday 5 March 2022 at 11:15am GMT. Keep an eye on our social media channels for the link to watch the video feed. If you’re able to make it to the National Museum of Computing on Saturday, tickets are available to purchase.

    We’re delighted to celebrate 10 years with all of you, and we’re excited about the next 10 years of Raspberry Pi.

    Website: LINK

  • Celebrate CoderDojo’s 10th birthday with us!

    Celebrate CoderDojo’s 10th birthday with us!

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    We are inviting you all to a very special event this week: the CoderDojo team is hosting a 10th birthday livestream to celebrate the CoderDojo community and all that they have achieved over the last ten years.

    Everyone is welcome, so mark your diary and make sure you and your favourite young coders join us for all the fun at 18:00 BST this Thursday, 28 October

    Together we will hear stories from young people and volunteers around the world, and from James Whelton and Bill Liao, the co-founders of CoderDojo.

    Ten years of community spirit

    In July 2011, James Whelton and Bill Liao held the first-ever CoderDojo session in Cork, Ireland. They created a space for young people to learn how to create a website, design a game, or write their first program. The session was also a chance for volunteers to share their experience and time with a younger generation and their peers. It was here that the CoderDojo grassroots community came into existence, built on the values of ‘being cool’: creativity, collaboration, openness, and fun.

    A Dojo session in Ireland.

    These values continue to inspire young people (Ninjas) and volunteers around the world to be part of their local Dojos. In 2017, the CoderDojo Foundation, which was founded to support the CoderDojo movement, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation joined forces to better support the community to bring opportunities to more young people worldwide.

    A man helps four young people to code projects at laptops in a CoderDojo session.
    A Dojo session in Uganda.

    The tenth year of the movement is an especially important time for us to celebrate the volunteers who have put so much into CoderDojo. As well as the livestream celebration on 28 October, the CoderDojo team has put together free digital assets to get volunteers and Ninjas in the birthday spirit, and a special birthday giveaway for Ninjas who are coding projects to mark this momentous anniversary.

    Three young people learn coding at laptops supported by a volunteer at a CoderDojo session.
    A CoderDojo session in India.

    Ten things we love about you

    In celebration of the CoderDojo movement’s 10th birthday, here’s a list of some of our favourite things about the CoderDojo community.  

    1. You are always having so much fun!

    Whether you’re working together in person or online, you are always having a blast!

    2. You are resilient and committed to your club 

    The pandemic has been an extremely difficult time for Dojos. It has also been a time of adaptation. We have been so impressed by how community members have switched their ways of running with positivity and commitment to 6. do what is best for their clubs.

    A tweet about CoderDojo.

    3. You support each other

    Every day, Dojo volunteers support each other locally and globally to sustain the movement and help Ninjas learn — from sharing how they run sessions when social distancing is necessary, to translating online resources and web pages so that more people around the world can join the CoderDojo community.

    “We know that we’re not out there alone, that there’s a whole world of people who are all collaborating with the same mission in mind is really thrilling as well.”

    Nikole Vaughn, CoderDojo Collaborative in San Antonio, Texas

    4. You tell the team how to support you 

    Filling in surveys, emailing the CoderDojo team here, attending webinars, sharing your insights — these are all the ways you’re great at communicating your Dojo’s needs. We love supporting you!

    5. You help young people create positive change in their community 

    We love to hear about how CoderDojo volunteers help young people to create and learn with technology, and to become mentors for their peers. Recently we shared the stories of Avye, Laura, and Toshan, three incredible digital makers who, thanks to CoderDojo, are using technology to shape the world around them.

    Laura, teenage roboticist and CoderDojo Ninja, with and-Catherine Grace Coleman.
    Laura says, “I joined my local CoderDojo, and it changed my life.”

    6. You love a challenge

    From coding for the CoderDojo 10th birthday giveaway to the European Astro Pi Challenge, CoderDojo members love to put themselves to the test!   

    7. You brought Coolest Projects into the world 

    Coolest Projects is the world-leading technology fair for young people, and it originated in the CoderDojo community!

    The crowd at a Coolest Projects event.

    This year, in its ninth year running, Coolest Projects again was a platform for fantastic tech projects from Ninjas, including an AI bicycle app and a glove that makes music.

    8. You are committed to creating inclusive spaces 

    CoderDojo is a space for everyone to create and learn with technology. We love that Dojos get involved in projects such as the ‘Empowering the future’ guide to getting more girls involved in coding, and the CoderDojo Accessibility Guide to making Dojo sessions accessible for young people of all abilities and neurodiversity.

    A tweet about CoderDojo.

    9. You are a community that continues to grow stronger

    Over the last ten years, more than 3900 Dojos in 115 countries have run sessions for over 270000 young people and have been regularly supporting 100000 young coders! You’ve certainly brought the movement a long way from that very first session in Cork.   

    10. You are simply the best grassroots community on the planet! 

    All the volunteers who have put their time and energy into CoderDojo have made the movement what it is today, and we’d like to say a massive thank you to each and every one of you.

    A clip of David Bowie pointing at the viewer and saying 'you', with overlayed text 'you're the best'.

    Let’s celebrate together! 

    So prepare your favourite celebratory food and join us for the birthday livestream on Thursday 28 October at 18:00 BST! Take this chance to say hi to community members and celebrate everything that they have achieved in the last ten years.

    Set a reminder for the livestream, and tell us how you are celebrating CoderDojo’s 10th birthday using the hashtag #10YearsOfCoderDojo on Twitter. 

    Website: LINK

  • Raspberry Jams around the world celebrate Raspberry Pi’s 8th birthday

    Raspberry Jams around the world celebrate Raspberry Pi’s 8th birthday

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Happy birthday to us: tomorrow marks the eighth birthday of the Raspberry Pi computer!

    On 29 February 2012 we launched our very first $35 credit card-sized computer, Raspberry Pi 1 Model B. Since then, we’ve sold over 30 million Raspberry Pi computers worldwide. People all over the world (and beyond!) use them to learn, teach, and make cool stuff; industrial customers embed Raspberry Pi devices in their own products or use them to monitor and control factory processes. As an early birthday present, yesterday we cut the price of the 2GB RAM Raspberry Pi 4 Model B from $45 to $35: now you can buy a no-compromises desktop PC for the same price as Raspberry Pi 1 in 2012.

    A Raspberry Pi stuck into a piece of birthday cake

    Don’t try this at home: you may damage your Raspberry Pi or teeth.

    A global community of Raspberry Jams

    Throughout the last eight years, a passionate community of enthusiasts has championed the use of Raspberry Pi, and our library of free resources, by hosting Raspberry Jams: events where people of all ages come together to learn about digital making in a fun, friendly, and inclusive environment.

    Raspberry Jam logo and illustrations

    To celebrate Raspberry Pi’s in style, Raspberry Jam community members around the world are hosting special birthday-themed events during the whole month from 15 February to 15 March.

    Our special thanks to The Pi Hut for shipping our special birthday packs to these Jams all over the world!

    Raspberry Jam branded goodies

    The contents of the packs we sent to Raspberry Jams that registered events during our birthday month. Thanks for the photo go to Andy Melder, who runs Southend and Chelmsford Raspberry Jams.

    20 Birthday Jams have already taken place in Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Greece, India, the UK, and the US. In total, there are at least 118 Birthday Jam events across 35 countries on 6 continents this year! (We’re determined to reach Antarctica one day soon.)

    Jams can take many forms, from talks and workshops based around the Raspberry Pi computer, to project showcases and hackathons. Here is a selection of photos from some of the birthday events community members have run over the last fortnight:

    Shoutout to Tokyo Raspberry Jam

    We’d like to give a special mention to Masafumi Ohta and our friends at Tokyo Raspberry Jam, who have had to postpone their Birthday Jam due to coronavirus-related safety restrictions currently in place across Japan.

    Someone blowing out the candles of a birthday cake

    The Birthday Jam in Tokyo in 2018

    The whole team at the Foundation sends their best wishes to everyone who is affected by the virus!

    You can still join in the celebrations

    Jam makers are running birthday events up to and including 15 March, so check out the Raspberry Jam world map to find your nearest Birthday Jam!

    Chelmsford Raspberry Jam, celebrating Raspberry Pi’s eighth birthday with multiple generations

    If you’d like to host your own Jam, we also have free resources to help you get started and free starter projects made especially for Jam events.

    It’s really simple to register your Birthday Jam: just fill in the Raspberry Jam submission form, including a valid event information URL linking to a webpage with more information about your event. (This is an excellent example of a Jam event listing.)

    As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask us via [email protected].

    Website: LINK

  • A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35

    A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    TL;DR: it’s our eighth birthday, and falling RAM prices have allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 to $35. You can buy one here.

    Happy birthday to us

    In two days’ time, it will be our eighth birthday (or our second, depending on your point of view). Many of you set your alarms and got up early on the morning of 29 February 2012, to order your Raspberry Pi from our newly minted licensee partners, RS Components and Premier Farnell. In the years since, we’ve sold over 30 million Raspberry Pi computers; we’ve seen our products used in an incredible range of applications all over the world (and occasionally off it); and we’ve found our own place in a community of makers, hobbyists, engineers and educators who are changing the world, one project, or one student, at a time.

    The first Raspberry Pi

    When we first started talking about Raspberry Pi 1 Model B back in 2011, we were very clear about what we were trying to build: a desktop Linux PC with interfacing capabilities for $35. At the time, it seemed obvious that our low price point would come with compromises. Even though you could use your Raspberry Pi 1 to watch HD video, or play Quake 3, or compile the Linux kernel, or automate a factory, some things – like browsing modern, JavaScript-heavy websites – were out of reach.

    Our very first website led with an early prototype running an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop

    Improving performance

    Every subsequent product – from quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 in 2015, to 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 in 2016, to Raspberry Pi 3+ in 2018 – whittled down those compromises a little further. By offering steadily increasing processing power at a time when the performance of traditional PCs had begun to stagnate, we were gradually able to catch up with typical PC use cases. With each generation, more people were able to use a Raspberry Pi as their daily-driver PC.

    The Raspberry Pi I’d buy for my parents

    Until, in June of last year, we launched Raspberry Pi 4. Roughly forty times faster than the original Raspberry Pi, for the first time we have a no-compromises PC for the majority of users. I’ve described Raspberry Pi 4 as “the Raspberry Pi I’d buy for my parents”, and since I bought them a Desktop Kit for Christmas they’ve found it to be basically indistinguishable in performance and functionality from other PCs.

    In a sense, this was a “mission accomplished” moment. But Raspberry Pi 4 brought its own compromises: for the first time we couldn’t fit as much memory as we wanted into the base product. While the $35 1GB device makes a great media player, home server, or embedded controller, to get the best desktop experience you need at least 2GB of RAM. At launch this would have cost you $45.

    Dropping the price of 2GB

    Which brings us to today’s announcement. The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35. Effective immediately, you will be able to buy a no-compromises desktop PC for the same price as Raspberry Pi 1 in 2012. In comparison to that original machine, we offer:

    • 40× the CPU performance
    • 8× the memory
    • 10× the I/O bandwidth
    • 4× the number of pixels on screen
    • Two screens instead of one
    • Dual-band wireless networking

    And of course, thanks to inflation, $35 in 2012 is equivalent to nearly $40 today. So effectively you’re getting all these improvements, and a $5 price cut.

    We’re going to keep working to make Raspberry Pi a better desktop computer. But this feels like a great place to be, eight years in. We hope you’ve enjoyed the first eight years of our journey as much as we have: here’s to another eight!

    FAQs

    Is this a permanent price cut?

    Yes.

    What about the 1GB product?

    In line with our commitment to long-term support, the 1GB product will remain available to industrial and commercial customers, at a list price of $35. As there is no price advantage over the 2GB product, we expect most users to opt for the larger-memory variant.

    What about the 4GB product?

    The 4GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 will remain on sale, priced at $55.

    Website: LINK

  • Celebrate the Raspberry Pi’s 8th birthday at a Raspberry Jam

    Celebrate the Raspberry Pi’s 8th birthday at a Raspberry Jam

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    On 29 February 2020, the Raspberry Pi Foundation will celebrate the eighth birthday of the Raspberry Pi computer (or its second birthday, depending on how strict you are about counting leap years).

    Like any parent, we feel like time has flown by, and it’s remarkable to think how far we’ve come in such a short space of time.

    Since launching the credit-card–sized $35 Raspberry Pi Model B, we have sold 30 million high-quality, low-cost computers worldwide. Raspberry Pi has become the third best-selling general-purpose computer ever, behind only the Mac and the PC.

    Women using Raspberry Pi and Trinket

    Our latest model, Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, is still the size of a credit card and still costs $35, but it’s around 20 times faster, with more and speedier connectivity, as well as the neater board design that we introduced in 2014. Raspberry Pi computers are used everywhere from homes, schools, and factories to penguin colonies, volcanoes, and the International Space Station.

    An amazing community

    In many ways, what’s been even more remarkable than the success of the product is the amazing community that has formed around our tiny, low-cost computer. These are the makers, educators, hobbyists, and entrepreneurs from all walks of life and all corners of the globe who share our passion for inspiring the next generation of digital creators. You can often read about them on this blog and in the official community magazine, The MagPi. You can also meet them in person at a Raspberry Jam.

    Raspberry Jam Manchester

    Meet up with other Raspberry Pi enthusiasts!

    Celebrate at a Raspberry Jam

    Raspberry Jams are community-led meetups that bring people together to share, connect, and learn from each other. The first one was held in Manchester in 2012, and so far Jams have been held in more than 70 countries — and that’s just the ones we know about.

    While Jams take place throughout the year, there’s a special tradition of Jams celebrating the birthday of the Raspberry Pi computer. This year, there were over 130 Raspberry Jam events in 39 countries, attended by 8000 people. Now that’s a party!

    Register your Birthday Jam and we’ll send you some special swag

    Next year, because it’s a big birthday, we’ll be sending a special box of swag to any Jam that is taking place between Saturday 15 February and Sunday 15 March 2020.

    It’s really simple to register your Birthday Jam: just fill in the Raspberry Jam submission form, including a valid event information URL linking to a webpage with more information about your event. (This is an excellent example of a Jam event listing.)

    Raspberry Jam logo and illustrations

    We’d prefer you to link to a public ticketing system (e.g. Eventbrite) if possible, but we know some libraries and community centres have restrictions that prevent them from doing this.

    In order to ensure that your pack reaches you in time, we need you to register your Birthday Jam at least six weeks before your event.

    As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask us via [email protected].

    Website: LINK

  • Happy birthday to us!

    Happy birthday to us!

    Reading Time: 8 minutes

    The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that today is 28 February, which is as close as you’re going to get to our sixth birthday, given that we launched on a leap day. For the last three years, we’ve launched products on or around our birthday: Raspberry Pi 2 in 2015; Raspberry Pi 3 in 2016; and Raspberry Pi Zero W in 2017. But today is a snow day here at Pi Towers, so rather than launching something, we’re taking a photo tour of the last six years of Raspberry Pi products before we don our party hats for the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend this Saturday and Sunday.

    Prehistory

    Before there was Raspberry Pi, there was the Broadcom BCM2763 ‘micro DB’, designed, as it happens, by our very own Roger Thornton. This was the first thing we demoed as a Raspberry Pi in May 2011, shown here running an ARMv6 build of Ubuntu 9.04.

    BCM2763 micro DB

    Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi, 2011-style

    A few months later, along came the first batch of 50 “alpha boards”, designed for us by Broadcom. I used to have a spreadsheet that told me where in the world each one of these lived. These are the first “real” Raspberry Pis, built around the BCM2835 application processor and LAN9512 USB hub and Ethernet adapter; remarkably, a software image taken from the download page today will still run on them.

    Raspberry Pi alpha board, top view

    Raspberry Pi alpha board

    We shot some great demos with this board, including this video of Quake III:

    Raspberry Pi – Quake 3 demo

    A little something for the weekend: here’s Eben showing the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3, and chatting a bit about the performance of the board. Thanks to Rob Bishop and Dave Emett for getting the demo running.

    Pete spent the second half of 2011 turning the alpha board into a shippable product, and just before Christmas we produced the first 20 “beta boards”, 10 of which were sold at auction, raising over £10000 for the Foundation.

    The beginnings of a Bramble

    Beta boards on parade

    Here’s Dom, demoing both the board and his excellent taste in movie trailers:

    Raspberry Pi Beta Board Bring up

    See http://www.raspberrypi.org/ for more details, FAQ and forum.

    Launch

    Rather to Pete’s surprise, I took his beta board design (with a manually-added polygon in the Gerbers taking the place of Paul Grant’s infamous red wire), and ordered 2000 units from Egoman in China. After a few hiccups, units started to arrive in Cambridge, and on 29 February 2012, Raspberry Pi went on sale for the first time via our partners element14 and RS Components.

    Pallet of pis

    The first 2000 Raspberry Pis

    Unboxing continues

    The first Raspberry Pi from the first box from the first pallet

    We took over 100000 orders on the first day: something of a shock for an organisation that had imagined in its wildest dreams that it might see lifetime sales of 10000 units. Some people who ordered that day had to wait until the summer to finally receive their units.

    Evolution

    Even as we struggled to catch up with demand, we were working on ways to improve the design. We quickly replaced the USB polyfuses in the top right-hand corner of the board with zero-ohm links to reduce IR drop. If you have a board with polyfuses, it’s a real limited edition; even more so if it also has Hynix memory. Pete’s “rev 2” design made this change permanent, tweaked the GPIO pin-out, and added one much-requested feature: mounting holes.

    Revision 1 versus revision 2

    If you look carefully, you’ll notice something else about the revision 2 board: it’s made in the UK. 2012 marked the start of our relationship with the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, South Wales. In the five years since, they’ve built every product we offer, including more than 12 million “big” Raspberry Pis and more than one million Zeros.

    Celebrating 500,000 Welsh units, back when that seemed like a lot

    Economies of scale, and the decline in the price of SDRAM, allowed us to double the memory capacity of the Model B to 512MB in the autumn of 2012. And as supply of Model B finally caught up with demand, we were able to launch the Model A, delivering on our original promise of a $25 computer.

    A UK-built Raspberry Pi Model A

    In 2014, James took all the lessons we’d learned from two-and-a-bit years in the market, and designed the Model B+, and its baby brother the Model A+. The Model B+ established the form factor for all our future products, with a 40-pin extended GPIO connector, four USB ports, and four mounting holes.

    The Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ — entering the era of proper product photography with a bang.

    New toys

    While James was working on the Model B+, Broadcom was busy behind the scenes developing a follow-on to the BCM2835 application processor. BCM2836 samples arrived in Cambridge at 18:00 one evening in April 2014 (chips never arrive at 09:00 — it’s always early evening, usually just before a public holiday), and within a few hours Dom had Raspbian, and the usual set of VideoCore multimedia demos, up and running.

    We launched Raspberry Pi 2 at the start of 2015, pairing BCM2836 with 1GB of memory. With a quad-core Arm Cortex-A7 clocked at 900MHz, we’d increased performance sixfold, and memory fourfold, in just three years.

    Nobody mention the xenon death flash.

    And of course, while James was working on Raspberry Pi 2, Broadcom was developing BCM2837, with a quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.2GHz. Raspberry Pi 3 launched barely a year after Raspberry Pi 2, providing a further doubling of performance and, for the first time, wireless LAN and Bluetooth.

    All our recent products are just the same board shot from different angles

    Zero to hero

    Where the PC industry has historically used Moore’s Law to “fill up” a given price point with more performance each year, the original Raspberry Pi used Moore’s law to deliver early-2000s PC performance at a lower price. But with Raspberry Pi 2 and 3, we’d gone back to filling up our original $35 price point. After the launch of Raspberry Pi 2, we started to wonder whether we could pull the same trick again, taking the original Raspberry Pi platform to a radically lower price point.

    The result was Raspberry Pi Zero. Priced at just $5, with a 1GHz BCM2835 and 512MB of RAM, it was cheap enough to bundle on the front of The MagPi, making us the first computer magazine to give away a computer as a cover gift.

    Cheap thrills

    MagPi issue 40 in all its glory

    We followed up with the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W, launched exactly a year ago. This adds the wireless LAN and Bluetooth functionality from Raspberry Pi 3, using a rather improbable-looking PCB antenna designed by our buddies at Proant in Sweden.

    Up to our old tricks again

    Other things

    Of course, this isn’t all. There has been a veritable blizzard of point releases; RAM changes; Chinese red units; promotional blue units; Brazilian blue-ish units; not to mention two Camera Modules, in two flavours each; a touchscreen; the Sense HAT (now aboard the ISS); three compute modules; and cases for the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Zero (the former just won a Design Effectiveness Award from the DBA). And on top of that, we publish three magazines (The MagPi, Hello World, and HackSpace magazine) and a whole host of Project Books and Essentials Guides.

    Chinese Raspberry Pi 1 Model B

    RS Components limited-edition blue Raspberry Pi 1 Model B

    Brazilian-market Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

    Visible-light Camera Module v2

    Learning about injection moulding the hard way

    250 pages of content each month, every month

    Essential reading

    Forward the Foundation

    Why does all this matter? Because we’re providing everyone, everywhere, with the chance to own a general-purpose programmable computer for the price of a cup of coffee; because we’re giving people access to tools to let them learn new skills, build businesses, and bring their ideas to life; and because when you buy a Raspberry Pi product, every penny of profit goes to support the Raspberry Pi Foundation in its mission to change the face of computing education.

    We’ve had an amazing six years, and they’ve been amazing in large part because of the community that’s grown up alongside us. This weekend, more than 150 Raspberry Jams will take place around the world, comprising the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend.

    Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend 2018. GIF with confetti and bopping JAM balloons

    If you want to know more about the Raspberry Pi community, go ahead and find your nearest Jam on our interactive map — maybe we’ll see you there.

    Website: LINK