Operation Manual

Our Community
The Raspberry Pi community is one of the things we’re proudest of. We started with a very bare-bones blog at www.raspberrypi.org just after Rory’s
May 2011 video, and put up a forum on the same website shortly after that. That forum now has more than 20,000 members—between them they’ve
contributed more than 100,000 posts of wit and wisdom about the Raspberry Pi. If there’s any question, no matter how abstruse, that you want to ask
about the Raspberry Pi or about programming in general, someone there will have the answer (if it’s not in this book, you’ll find it in the forums).
Part of my job at Raspberry Pi involves giving talks to hacker groups, computing conferences, teachers, programming collectives and the like, and
there’s always someone in the audience who has talked to me or to my wife Liz (who runs the community) on the Raspberry Pi website—and some
of these people have become good friends of ours. The Raspberry Pi website gets around one request every single second of the day.
There are now hundreds of fan sites out there. There’s also a fan magazine called The MagPi (a free download from www.themagpi.com), which is
produced monthly by community members, with type-in listings, lots of articles, project guides, tutorials and more. Type-in games in magazines and
books provided an easy route into programming for me—my earliest programming experience with the BBC Micro was of modifying a type-in
helicopter game to add enemies and pick-ups.
We blog something interesting about the device at www.raspberrypi.org at least once every day. Come and join in the conversation!
There were 100,000 people on our mailing list wanting a Raspberry Pi—and they all put an order in on day one! Not
surprisingly, this brought up a few issues.
First off, there are the inevitable paper cuts you’re going to get boxing up 100,000 little computers and mailing them out—and
the fact was that we had absolutely no money to hire people to do this for us. We didn’t have a warehouse—we had Jack’s
garage. There was no way we could raise the money to build 100,000 units at once—we’d envisaged making them in batches of
2,000 every couple of weeks, which, with this level of interest, was going to take so long that the thing would be obsolete before
we managed to fulfil all the orders. Clearly, manufacturing and distribution were something we were going to have to give up on
and hand over to somebody else who already had the infrastructure and capital to do that, so we got in touch with element14
and RS Components, both UK microelectronics suppliers with worldwide businesses, and contracted with them to do the actual
manufacture and distribution side of things worldwide so we could concentrate on development and the Raspberry Pi
Foundation’s charitable goals.
Demand on the first day was still so large that RS and element14’s websites both crashed for most of the day—at one point in
the day, element14 were getting seven orders a second, and for a couple of hours on February 29, Google showed more
searches were made worldwide for “Raspberry Pi” than were made for “Lady Gaga”. I’m writing this in early June 2012, and
orders in the three months since we opened for business have topped half a million units, even though we’re still at a point when
neither company will sell you more than one Raspberry Pi (they’re trying to get rid of their order backlogs before they turn on the
ability to multiorder). At this point, if we’d gone with our original plans, we’d have made 100 or so of these devices for
University open days, and that would have been it.
There is nothing that affects the blood pressure quite like accidentally ending up running a large computer company!
So what can you do with the Raspberry Pi?
This book explores a number of things you can do with your Raspberry Pi, from controlling hardware with Python, to using it as
a media centre, or building games in Scratch. The beauty of the Raspberry Pi is that it’s just a very tiny general-purpose
computer (which may be a little slower than you’re used to for some desktop applications, but much better at some other stuff
than a regular PC), so you can do anything you could do on a regular computer with it. In addition, the Raspberry Pi has
powerful multimedia and 3D graphics capabilities, so it has the potential to be used as a games platform, and we very much hope
to see people starting to write games for it.
We think physical computing—building systems using sensors, motors, lights and microcontrollers—is something that gets
overlooked in favour of pure software projects in a lot of instances, and it’s a shame, because physical computing is massive fun.
To the extent that there’s any children’s computing movement at the moment, it’s a physical computing movement. The LOGO
turtles that represented physical computing when we were kids are now fighting robots, quadcopters or parent-sensing bedroom
doors, and we love it. However, the lack of General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) on home PCs is a real handicap for many
people getting started with robotics projects. The Raspberry Pi exposes GPIO so you can get to work straight away.
I keep being surprised by ideas the community comes up with which wouldn’t have crossed my mind in a thousand years: the
Australian school meteor-tracking project; the Boreatton Scouts in the UK and their robot, which is controlled via an
electroencephalography headset (the world’s first robot controlled by Scouting brain waves); the family who are building a robot
vacuum cleaner. And I’m a real space cadet, so reading about the people sending Raspberry Pis into near-earth orbit on rockets
and balloons gives me goosebumps.
Success for us would be another 1,000 people every year taking up Computer Science at the university level in the UK. That
would not only be beneficial for the country, the software and hardware industries, and the economy; but it would be even more
beneficial for every one of those 1,000 people, who, I hope, discover that there’s a whole world of possibilities and a great deal