The Raspberry Pi:

Introduction:

The Raspberry Pi Foundation and Broadcom collaborated to create a line of compact single-board computers (SBCs) called Raspberry Pi in the UK. The initial focus of the Raspberry Pi project was to encourage the study of fundamental computer science in classrooms and in underdeveloped nations. The initial model sold outside of its intended market for applications like robotics because it was more widely used than planned. Because of its inexpensive cost, versatility, and open design, it is frequently utilised in numerous fields, including weather monitoring. Due to its support of the HDMI and USB standards, computer and electronic enthusiasts frequently utilise it.

 

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Eben Upton was appointed CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading by the Raspberry Pi Foundation following the introduction of the second board type, and given the task of developing technologies. The Foundation was repurposed as an educational nonprofit to support the introduction of fundamental computer science curricula in classrooms and underdeveloped nations. While some Pis are produced in China and Japan, the majority are produced in a Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales.

 

History:

The 1981 Acorn BBC Micro served as an inspiration for the computer. The BBC Micro computer, created by Acorn Computers in the United Kingdom, had three original models: Model A, Model B, and Model B+.

 

Upton claims that the name "Raspberry Pi" was picked with "Pi" being a nod to the Python programming language and "Raspberry" paying homage to a custom of naming early computer firms after fruits.

 

Early designs for the Raspberry Pi were built around the Atmel ATmega644 microprocessor in 2006. Its PCB layout and schematics are available to the general public. To create a computer that would excite kids, foundation trustee Eben Upton gathered a team of educators, scholars, and computer aficionados.

 

The initial ARM computer prototype was housed in a container the same size as a USB memory stick. On one end, it had a USB port, and on the other, an HDMI port.

 

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Pre-launch:

u Trustee Eben Upton openly contacted the RISC OS Open neighbourhood in July 2011 to request help with a port. Since then, Adrian Lees at Broadcom has worked on the port; his contributions are mentioned in a discussion of the graphics drivers. NOOBS now includes this port.

 

u 50 alpha boards are produced in August 2011. These boards were physically larger to accommodate debug headers but otherwise identical to the proposed Model B in terms of functionality. The board was demonstrated running the Debian LXDE desktop, Quake 3 in 1080p, and Full HD MPEG-4 video over HDMI.

u A public demonstration of RISC OS 5 took place in October 2011. A year later, in November 2012, the port was made available to the public.

u Twenty-five Model B Beta boards were built and tested in December 2011 using one hundred unpopulated PCBs. The Beta boards had the same component arrangement as the boards used in production. A single design flaw was found in the board's layout, causing some of the CPU's pins to not be held high. This flaw was remedied in time for the first production run. The beta boards were shown running the Rightware Samurai OpenGL ES test, booting Linux, and playing a 1080p movie trailer.

u Early 2012 - The first 10 boards were put up for auction on eBay during the first week of the year. One was purchased anonymously and presented to the museum in Cambridge, England's Centre for Computing History. The ten boards—whose combined retail value was $220—raised more than $16,000, with serial number 01—the final to be auctioned—raising $3,500. The Foundation's servers had trouble keeping up with the load before the debut, which was scheduled for the end of February 2012. This was due to viewers refreshing their browsers frequently.

 

Launch:

l The first proof-of-concept SD card image that could be placed into an SD card to create a test operating system is released on February 19, 2012. Based on Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), the image included the LXDE desktop environment, the Midori browser, as well as a number of programming tools. Additionally, the image runs on QEMU, enabling the Raspberry Pi to be simulated on a variety of other systems.

l 29 February 2012 - The first sales start on February 29 at 6:00 UTC. At the same time, it was revealed that the model A's 128 MB of RAM would be increased to 256 MB prior to its release. "Six years after the project's inception, we're practically reaching the end of our first run of development," the Foundation's website added. "However, it's just the beginning of the Raspberry Pi tale." Following the debut, Premier Farnell and RS Components, the two authorised manufacturers selling Raspberry Pis in the UK, experienced website stalls due to high web traffic (RS Components briefly going down completely).Unverified rumours claimed that there were over two million pre-orders or expressions of interest. Premier Farnell sold out shortly after going on sale, according to the official Raspberry Pi Twitter account, while RS Components received over 100,000 preorders on the first day. A "decent amount" of pre-orders were reportedly being accepted by manufacturers in March 2012.

l March 2012 - The installation of a wrong Ethernet connection caused shipping delays for the initial batch, but the Foundation anticipated that manufacturing volumes for subsequent batches could be expanded without too much difficulty if necessary. Upton noted that the two distributors, Premier Farnell and RS Components, "have been wonderful in assisting to obtain components." "We have assured we can acquire them [the Ethernet connectors with magnetics] in large numbers," Upton said. Taiwan and China produced the 10,000-board initial batch.

l Release of Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix, the suggested Linux distro created by Canada's Seneca College, takes place on March 8.

l The Debian port is started in March 2012 by Mike Thompson, the former CTO of Atomz. With some assistance from the Foundation, Thompson and Peter Green, a volunteer Debian developer, carried out the work primarily on their own. The Foundation tested the early binaries that the two created (neither Thompson nor Green had physical access to the hardware, as boards were not widely accessible at the time due to demand).Although Thompson and Green's Raspbian project was similar to the initial proof of concept image released by the Foundation prior to launch, it deviated from it in a few areas. Raspbian attempted to track then-upcoming Debian Wheezy packages, but the POC image was based on then-stable Debian Squeeze. The armhf architecture, which became the basis for the Raspbian project, was also going to be introduced with Wheezy in addition to the revised packages that would accompany the new version. The Squeeze-based POC image was restricted to the armel architecture and represented the Debian project's most recent effort to make Debian work on the most recent ARM embedded-application binary interface at the time Squeeze was released (EABI).While armel was only capable of simulating floating point operations in software, Debian was designed to run on the ARM VFP hardware floating-point unit thanks to the armhf architecture in Wheezy. Making use of the hardware unit would improve performance and consume less power for floating point operations as the Raspberry Pi came with a VFP. However, the armhf effort in mainline Debian was independent of the work on the Pi and solely meant to make Debian run on ARMv7 at the very least, thus the Pi, an ARMv6 device, would not gain anything from it. Thompson and Green decided to use a bespoke build cluster to create the device's 19,000 Debian packages.

 

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Post-launch:

l Reports from the first customers who received their Raspberry Pis surface on April 16, 2012.

l The Model A and Model B schematics are made public on April 20, 2012.

l On May 18, 2012, The Foundation posted a blog entry on a camera module prototype that they had tested. The 14-megapixel module was used in the prototype.

l 22 May 2012 – 20,000+ units had already been shipped.

l Raspbian was released in July 2012.

l 16 July 2012 – It was revealed that 4,000 devices were being produced each day, enabling bulk purchases of Raspberry Pis.

l 24 August 2012 - After it was discovered that the current licence also allowed encoding, hardware-accelerated video (H.264) encoding became available. Prior to the announcement of the camera module, it was believed that encoding would be introduced. On the other hand, there is no reliable software for hardware H.264 encoding. MPEG-2 and Microsoft's VC-1 were two additional codecs that the Foundation simultaneously published and can be purchased separately. Additionally, it was revealed that the Pi will support CEC, enabling remote control operation of the television.

l The Raspberry Pi Model B underwent a second redesign on September 5, 2012, according to the Foundation. The announcement of a revision 2.0 board includes a number of small updates and fixes.

l The majority of Raspberry Pi systems will now be produced in the UK at Sony's manufacturing site in Pencoed, Wales, according to an announcement made on September 6th. The plant, according to the Foundation, would produce 30,000 units per month and add roughly 30 new employment.

l New Raspberry Pi Model Bs will have 512 MB of RAM instead of 256 MB, it is announced on October 15.

l October 24, 2012 - Although this claim has not been widely accepted, the Foundation claims that "all of the VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM" had been released as free software under a BSD-style licence, making it "the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided" (as opposed to partial, reverse-engineered) drivers.The complete source release of the graphics stack and the release of the VideoCore IV graphics core's comprehensive documentation under a 3-clause BSD licence were both announced on February 28, 2014.

l One of the two major distributors' customers were reportedly forced to wait more than six months for their orders in October 2012. This was reportedly caused by challenges finding the CPU and this distributor's conservative sales forecasting.

l The Foundation launches the Pi Store on December 17, 2012, calling it "one-stop shop for all your Raspberry Pi (software) needs" in association with IndieCity and Velocix. Users can browse through many categories using an application that comes with Raspbian and download whatever they wish. Additionally, software can be uploaded for review and release.

l 3 June 2013 – The term "New Out of Box Software" (NOOBS) is used. By making the process of installing an operating system simpler, this facilitates the use of the Raspberry Pi. An SD card can be prepared without the use of special software by simply unzipping a file and copying its contents to an SD card with a FAT file system that is at least 4 GB in size. On the Raspberry Pi, the card can then be booted, and six operating systems are offered for the card's installation. Additionally, the system includes tools to edit the config.txt file, a recovery disc that enables speedy restoration of the installed OS, an online help button, and a web browser that opens the Raspberry Pi Forums.

l The Foundation reports in October 2013 that the one millionth Pi had been produced in the UK.

l November 2013: They report that between October 24 and October 31, the two millionth Raspberry Pi shipped.

l 28 February 2014 - On the day of the Raspberry Pi's second birthday, Broadcom and the Raspberry Pi foundation made an announcement about the release of the whole source code for the graphics stack and the VideoCore IV graphics engine under a 3-clause BSD licence.

l The Raspberry Pi Compute Module was introduced on April 7, 2014, according to the official Raspberry Pi blog. It is a device in a 200-pin DDR2 SO-DIMM memory module that is designed for use as the brains of consumer electronics goods.

l June 2014 - The three millionth Raspberry Pi shipped in early May 2014, according to the official Raspberry Pi blog.

l The Raspberry Pi Model B+ was introduced on July 14, 2014, through the official Raspberry Pi blog "the latest iteration of the Raspberry Pi. People have been requesting a number of tiny enhancements at the same price as the original Raspberry Pi model B ".

l The Raspberry Pi Model A+ was introduced on November 10, 2014, according to the official Raspberry Pi blog. It has the same processor and RAM as the Model A and is the smallest and least expensive ($20) Raspberry Pi to date. It shares the same shortcomings as the A in terms of Ethernet and USB ports, but it also benefits from the B+'s lower power consumption, micro-SD card slot, and 40-pin HAT compatible GPIO.

l The Raspberry Pi 2 was introduced on February 2, 2015, according to the Raspberry Pi blog. It resembles a Model B+ and contains a quad-core ARMv7 Cortex-A7 CPU running at 900 MHz, as well as double the memory (for a total of 1 GB) and full compatibility with the first-generation Raspberry Pis.

l 14 May 2015: Reportedly as a "side effect of the production optimizations" brought on by the Pi 2 development, the Model B+'s pricing was lowered from US$35 to $25. However, sceptics have pointed out that the price reduction appeared to be a direct response to the CHIP, a less expensive rival that was withdrawn in April 2017.

l Release of a new Raspbian operating system version based on Debian Jessie on September 29, 2015.

l The Raspberry Pi Foundation introduced the Raspberry Pi Zero on November 26, 2015; it is the smallest and least expensive member of the Raspberry Pi family to date, measuring 65 mm by 30 mm and costing $5. The Zero is smaller and consumes less power than the Model A+ but lacks camera and LCD ports. It was distributed that day in the UK and the US along with the Raspberry Pi magazine Magpi No. 40; as a result of the giveaway, practically all worldwide retailers sold out of MagPi.

l 29 February 2016 - Raspberry Pi 3 with built-in Wi-Fi BCM43438 802.11n 2.4 GHz and Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy and a BCM2837 1.2 GHz 64-bit quad CPU based on the ARMv8 Cortex-A53 (BLE). Raspbian will first be released in 32-bit form, with a 64-bit version following if "there is benefit in migrating to 64-bit mode." A new compute module based on BCM2837 was supposed to be coming out in a few months in the same event.

l The Raspberry Pi Foundation reports in February 2016 that it has sold eight million units (for all variants combined), surpassing the Amstrad PCW to become the most popular personal computer in the UK. In September 2016, ten million were sold.

l The 8 Mpixel Raspberry Pi Camera v2.1 was released on April 25, 2016, in both regular and NoIR (can receive IR) variants. The camera employs a Sony IMX219 chip with a 3280 x 2464 resolution. Software must be updated in order to utilise the new resolution.

l 10 October 2016 - NEC Display Solutions reports that a few commercial display models that will be on sale in the first half of 2017 will have a Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module.

l The Raspberry Pi Foundation announces a partnership with NEC Display Solutions on October 14. By the end of 2016, they anticipate that the general public will be able to purchase the Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module.

l 11 million units were sold on November 25, 2016.

l Launch of Compute Module 3 and Compute Module 3 Lite on January 16, 2017.

l Launch of the Raspberry Pi Zero W with WiFi and Bluetooth using chip scale antennas took place on February 28, 2017.

l On August 17, 2017, a new version of Raspbian based on Debian Stretch is released.

l The Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ on March 14, 2018—Pi Day—with performance upgrades over the Raspberry PI 3B computer, an upgraded version of the Broadcom application processor, improved wireless Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, and the addition of the 5 GHz band.

l Launch of Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ on November 15, 2018.

l Compute Module 3+ (CM3+/Lite, CM3+/8 GB, CM3+/16 GB, and CM3+/32 GB) was released on January 28.

l Launch of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and an updated Raspbian operating system based on Debian Buster took place on June 24, 2019.

l 30 million copies were sold as of December 10, 2019; annual sales are at 6 million.

l On May 28, 2020, a $75 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 model is launched. The 64-bit beta of Raspberry Pi OS, which is a fork of Raspbian that lets apps use more than 4GB of RAM, is now available.

l Launch of Compute Module 4 on October 19, 2020.

l Launch of the Raspberry Pi 400 on November 2, 2020. It is a keyboard that has a Raspberry Pi 4 built into it. The Raspberry Pi 4 has accessible GPIO pins.

l Launch of the Raspberry Pi Pico on January 21, 2021 It is Raspberry Pi's first product of its kind, a microcontroller. It is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 Microcontroller.

l 40 million units were sold on May 11, 2021.

l Sales of 42 million units as of September 21, 2021.

l Updated version 11 of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), based on Debian Bullseye, is released on October 30, 2021. With this update, the Raspberry Pi 4's default clock speed has been raised to 1.8 GHz.

l 43 million units were sold on November 16, 2021.

l 46 million pieces were sold on February 28, 2022, exactly ten years after the initial shipment.