Raspberry Pi Hacks

Preface

The inspiration for the Raspberry Pi was born when Eben Upton was working with computer science students at Cambridge University (see the Foreword for his own account). He saw a need for incoming students to have greater opportunities to obtain programming experience before they got to the university level. The first concept designs for what would become the Pi we know now were born in 2006. Alpha boards were demonstrated in late 2011, and the first 10 boards were auctioned off at the beginning of 2012, raising £16,000.

The first batch of 10,000 Raspberry Pis went on sale February 29, 2012. Toward the end of 2011, the SD card image for it had already been downloaded more than 50,000 times, hinting at its impending popularity. The two UK sellers at the time, Premier Farnell and RS Components, sold out within minutes, with the latter reporting more than 100,000 orders that day. Upton designed them for education—specifically Python, hence the “Pi” part of the name. But the tiny board caught the eye of already-experienced programmers and electronics hackers. As of this writing, a year and a half after that first day of sale, more than two million have been sold.

And then roughly 1.95 million of them got stuck in an office drawer while their owners gathered with hackerspace friends over beer and collectively lamented, “Yeah, I bought a Pi, but I haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. I was thinking I might use it to build a time machine and try to study the K-Pg event in person, ...