Data

• He graduated from the University of Cambridge, Bachelor of Physics and Mechanical Engineering, also has a Cambridge diploma in computer engineering and has a Ph.D.
• He was one of the founders of the game studio Ideaworks3D, and also worked at IBM.
• The author of several articles and even books (for example, the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary, written in collaboration with his father - Clive Upton).

Purpose Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is absolutely not needed by schools, children need it. This is the whole idea: this is a personal computer for the child. Personally, I have been programming since I was ten years old and have been doing this for twenty-five years Lord, how old I am! I'm almost dying! I turned thirty-five, and I still program four hours every night. And precisely because of this approach, I generally know how to program.

We closely monitor the situation with computer science in schools. At best, the school can allocate one to two hours a week. No one will be a good programmer in two hours a week. You need to have a computer in your room, and constantly poking around with it. Of course, many today have a PC, but many still don’t have one. In Britain, as in Russia, many people have no computers at all, but there are televisions.
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The idea was to create a machine that can be programmed for four hours in the evenings. It had to be very cheap and durable. Even if you broke it, what's the difference? This is not the same as breaking an iPad. Did the blue smoke go? Well, okay. You can just buy a new one.

BBC Micro has certainly become a source of inspiration for us. In the 80s it was an extremely popular computer in the UK. He was not only cheap, he also knew how to work with the equipment that everyone already had at home. No need to buy a monitor - use the TV. No need to take a special drive - take a tape recorder. This is a very simple and at the same time powerful concept. We understood that if we create a computer that costs between $ 25 and $ 35 and requires additional devices for another $ 100, which you do not have, it means that we did not cope with our task.

BBC Micro - the ideological inspirer of the Raspberry Pi and the most popular computer of the 80s

That's why the Raspberry Pi is initially compatible with ordinary mice and keyboards. All that is needed can often be found at all in a garbage dump. The possibilities are tremendous. Even if you have an old TV with a regular composite connector, you can use a metal hanger instead of a cable :).

The platform that we had before was created primarily for educational purposes. But then we saw experienced users adapt Raspberry to play videos, launch browsers on it, use Java applications. Often on RPi run highly specialized network applications. In general, now Raspberry is used in much more complex and demanding projects than we originally intended when working on an “educational computer”.

Now our audience is divided approximately 70/30: 70% of “adult geeks” and 30% are in the field of education. More precisely, it is difficult to say, this is a subjective impression that is made up of what we see on the Internet.

If we can call 700,000 users out of a million experienced users, then there are still 300,000 educational users. And much more than we ever planned. It is great that we entered a larger market than initially thought, and now we are in an even bigger market and remain there.

It is also good that experienced users do their bit. They not only take. In the first three months, we had two or three people offering very trivial 10-line patches, small changes to the kernel source code. But later began a rapid increase in the number of patches. If you take the image of Raspbian from April 2012 and compare it with August 2012, it becomes obvious how much all the users have done.

"Iron" side of things

For all the time it was released about six different versions of boards. The first version was based on the Atmel ATmega microcontroller. In 2006, there was also a version based on the Broadcom whale for developers. Then we got the name Raspberry Pi; on it we launched python.

There was another version, very small, it was shown on video with David in May 2011. This tiny machine can hardly be compared with a real Raspberry Pi, but it was possible to install Linux on it.

Later, in August 2011, we had alpha boards, and they were already cool. In terms of electronics, it was almost the final version. These cards were only fifty people, now it is antiques. One such I have. By the way, I can press the button in Broadcom and make ten more such cards if I want to secure a carefree retirement :).

But, of course, if I looked back a year later, I would have done a lot differently. For example, I would like to avoid all the problems with USB. We will solve this issue soon, but still.

The fact is that many users run into the limitations of our USB stack. So now this is the highest priority for us. It was assumed that the USB ports of Raspberry will be used only for connecting keyboards and mice, but it was naive on our part. We had to work a lot on performance and stability, much more than originally intended.

We have already made a number of changes to USB. Today, most USB devices work correctly. USB storage devices work well, network devices too. There were some problems with the webcam and some exotic mice and keyboards, but they almost coped with them. Older USB 1.0 devices also function normally.

We have a bunch of little patches suggested by the community. They solve problems like memory leaks, concurrency problems. The Linux kernel has three interrupt contexts, and they all work together, so many conflicts and race conditions arise. There are two types of interrupts in the ARM architecture: IRQ, FIQ. FIQ is not used in Linux. But we have learned to transfer the most critical time-consuming operations to FIQ.

In general, I think the chip for RP, we initially chose the right one. It’s not just that I work for Broadcom (I’m still a Broadcom employee, they hired me for the Foundation as a full-time employee). I'm just not sure that you can find an even cheaper chip. It’s not a fact that if we chose a different chip, it would work at the same level, certainly not in terms of multimedia. So it was a good choice.

By the way, this year we plan to release a slightly updated version of the board. While we have not yet decided exactly when. Changes will be small. We want to refine the power consumption. We have USB connectors on one side of the board, but they protrude too much, so we drown them a little. You have no idea how hard it is to do this, but everything will look much prettier. Some other connectors also protrude; they are difficult to fit into the case. Therefore, we want to “juggle” with the connectors. In general, we plan to change something this year, but the changes will be insignificant.

But, returning to the issue of energy consumption, I want to clarify. Now the input voltage of 5 V is converted by means of LDO to 3.3 V. We hope that we will be able to generate 3.3 V more efficiently: maybe using a pulsed power source. It all depends on the value we still pay attention to. LDO can be seen on the board, this is a very big and thick LDO (marked as RG2 on the board. - Ed.). If you take an infrared photo, the LDO on it will flash like a beacon. We want to fix it. Only it takes 300 mW, which is a big difference, because it could be fed to the USB port and a faster device connected. Plus the board will be less warm. And of course, we need to learn how to work with cheap power supplies. Now, if the power supply is unstable, this leads to difficulties in the operation of the entire board. In general, for the time being we have focused on small nuances — external devices on the board, but not on its “internalities”, not on architecture. Of course, all this takes a lot of time, because this is a development, we must find a good technical solution. We have to discuss everything with component manufacturers in order to find fairly cheap options. To do all this work with nutrition, we have to save on something else. But we have a couple of good tricks in stock to save 50 cents from each board, and we can spend this money to improve nutrition.

But it would still be nice to return on the first launch day. If, then, we knew our current volumes, we would know what to do. I would like to immediately use 512 MB of RAM, because it was not so expensive. It is a pity that we did not put the LED on the RJ – 45. We instead have a LED on the board, but if you put on the case, it is not visible.

In general, now I would change simple things, and not some frills. I would like to put a large capacitor somewhere else. People constantly touch it with a thumb when unplugging the power cord. I remember the story of Don Cobbley, one of our engineers. In December 2011, we made a small batch of rev 1 boards, they were assembled by hand in England. I gave one Cobbli board, and after five minutes he called me and said: "Well, my capacitor broke off." Although he still has a fee, he has been using it for a year and a half without problems.


Eben upton

Open (and not so) source

We are working on several open-source projects, provide them with financial support, cooperate with them at the technical level. Examples of such projects: Wayland, Weston (composite manager of Wayland), Pixmap, Smalltalk, Squeek. So far this is all, but I believe that much will be done around Python, around interaction with other platforms. All these projects are supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, as they are required by advanced users.

With Open Source will have to interact very closely. A large audience brought us additional funds, but since we are talking about enthusiasts and hackers, we were forced to return a significant part of the money to the community.

But, mentioning Wayland, can not be said about the X Server. Of course, it would be nice to have acceleration X, GLX and other convenient things for X. On the other hand, Wayland is a movement in the right direction. If you do not need network transparency, then Wayland is what you need. Plus, we must bear in mind that we have limited resources, that is, we have to focus on one thing. Again, we have little graphics software with which we need to maintain compatibility. There is no “five year program for X” that RP users should have.

In short, we do not have old software, and resources are limited. If we had two options and we could afford to invest only in X or only in Wayland, the choice in favor of Wayland would be much more logical. The people who work with us in this area are really the best. These people have a huge impact on the project (Wayland).

I recently saw screenshots and hope to get a demo this week. We will add the Wayland to our new SD card ... In the Wayland, everything will work in general, so that people can understand what we are doing. For now it will be just a demo for technical users. I hope in the next 3-4 months we will manage to make it work. We will do everything we need - 3D in the application window, 2D in the application window, we will improve the interface. Choose the top 10 applications that people use, and let's finish them, right up to Minecraft. We will achieve stability of work, and in the end Wayland will become our standard desktop.

We test only on the Raspbian version with optimization enabled for our math coprocessor (hard float). The rest of the distributions are made by the developers of these projects. Obviously, the two largest projects are Fedora and Arch.

Of course, I can not say about DTS. I think we will have DTS, but I do not know for sure and do not want to make plans for the future. I am discussing this issue with DTS, but we have not yet reached an agreement. Hope we get it. On the current chip, we have a DSP for decoding, and we have already done some work with it. After all, similar chips are supplied in many mobile phones, and they are all needed to decode DTS. So we will work. We have a 250 megaton DSP that can decode DTS at 20 megatons. That is, it is the largest DTS multi-stream that you can find. And ... yes, this situation is quite annoying.

While DTS is simply disabled, because we do not have a license. We are working on it with all our might. We can say that media centers lack only this small detail. Although, it would still be nice to improve the search on the track. Now you can only jump back and forth. But, in general, when we have DTS, everything should go much better. The fact is that we want to do everything legally. Although now you can get devices that lose DTS, but we suffer from the fact that we want to do everything "in white."

Regarding the graphics core driver, I will say this - this is the decision of Broadcom. I continue to argue and discuss this with Broadcom and hope that I do it for a reason. In general, there are already projects for reverse engineering, so there are almost no secrets left. Yes, and I do not believe that the intellectual property of Broadcom threatens something. However, this decision is Broadcom, not mine. They do what they see fit. I hope we can somehow influence them.

When we released the source last year, the reaction was mixed. We have seen both an extremely negative reaction and an extremely positive reaction from people whom I respect. But on the whole, all this demoralized us a little. Personally, I wondered: why am I doing this, why am I working so much?

We had many volunteers at Broadcom in the evenings and weekends to complete this release. Many people spent their free time, but in the end most of them were not satisfied. We are doing everything in our power. Therefore, whenever I meet with a company, I make a fuss about this, maybe I’m wasted, I don’t know. The technology is not so new, in general, this chip has long been used. Hopefully, over time, we can do something about it. The Pi Store, one might say, has not yet met expectations. However, we always knew that it would take some time. Now I just think that it will take more time than we expected.

Of course, we are interested in becoming a great platform for free applications. If you look at the Pi Store and on some Google Play or App Store, they are moving in different directions. For some, this is a commercial area, for others it is free. We will stop at free. If children want to have play software, you need to give them that opportunity.

We are looking for opportunities to add more things in the Store. We are planning to develop some compatibility layer with one of the mobile platforms. Then it will be easier to create mobile content. Hope this helps. We hope that more people will make open source packages and add them to the Store. Then you can simply double-click and get the program. I would be very happy if we had thousands of applications, but so far there are only 60 or 70. But we are working on this, because we want the children to have more choice.


David Breben, member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and creator of the Elite game with the early prototype of the Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Foundation

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is five trustees, something like an organization’s board of directors. It employs people and owns 100% of the business. So we were told to do lawyers. In Britain, if you have a non-profit organization that does something other than collecting money (in our case, is trading), then you must create another company that will belong to this NGO. This is our structure.

Our charity has five trustees, the company has five directors. The Raspberry Pi Foundation employs two people, four in the company. They have a common office, so there are only six people.

Plus we have several freelancers. There is a guy named Ben Evison, he is a very talented assembler programmer (the author of the RISC OS port on Raspberry Pi. - Ed.). We hired him as a freelancer. There is another guy named Tim Releange from Vancouver, Canada. He works on the dialect Small Talk, Scratch. On it, children are taught programming. Tim worked a lot on Scratch (to be exact, on a virtual machine), which is used there.

Also, several people work for us on a contract basis to maintain Google+ and Facebook. Another special person connects us with copyright infringing people on Ebay. Because it is very important to protect your brand. I know how it happens in Russia, but in Britain, if you do not defend your trademark, it will simply be taken away.

Interestingly, both of the last specialists are women. They both have small children, and they combine work with caring for them. This is a great way to work with very, very smart people: you need to give them flexible working conditions. Otherwise, these people would never work for you, because they have to look after children.

In a word, we have seven or eight people working on freelancing at any given time. Now, maybe eight or nine, because we have a couple of additional employees who came to us from our business partners.

Sales

The main thing in RP is that it weighs about 42 grams. So the RP box weighs two kilos, so it's very easy to move, right?

About 1.1–1.2 million Raspberry Pi have already been sold. Somewhere in February there was a million. More than a month has already passed since then, and we sell 100–200 thousand a month.

Our largest market is now in the United States. Traditionally, sales were as follows: 1/3 in North America, 1/3 in Britain and 1/3 in the rest of the world. But now America dominates by a wide margin. There it works according to the viral principle: people buy RP, show friends, like friends and - bang! Plus, we are widely represented in the media, and RP is in many hackspaces. (Hereinafter, the data is only for one of the two distributors, Premier Farnell. - Ed.)

In January, we sold about 3000 RP in Russia. A total of 900 thousand devices were sold at the end of January. Of the 100,000 later sold, about half went to Europe, about a third to the United States and Canada. As a result, the United States and Canada give us about 300 thousand sold RP. Europe - about 400-500 thousand.

We have certain progress in Russia, this is evident on the map, which shows where all the RPs are now. Many of them in Russia. Although, for example, in Italy we sold twice as much.

In general, we did not expect to sell a single RP in Russia. On the other hand, when you look at how many people live in Russia, what are the traditions of computer research and technical developments in Russia ... Perhaps we should sell you just millions of RP :).

Now we are going to “go” to Japan, we want to consolidate there. There we are not very strong yet, they have other guys. But in Japan, there was interest in us, so you need at least a little to develop in this area. We try every couple of months. We want to sell not only in Western Europe and North America, we want to sell in Brazil, Russia, the Philippines, everywhere.

We always hope that local distributors will buy RP and distribute it locally. One of the problems in Russia is that when you buy RP, it is often delivered to you from another country, but not sold by a second-hand dealer within the country. We are interested in having more such dealers, say, as in the USA. In the States, the situation is as follows: you can buy RP from dealers, and you can buy from dealers, which makes the market more competitive. These guys can not raise prices, because they compete with each other. We need to look for ways. In electronics stores, the price will be twice as high as ours, which will fill the gap, but this will be bad for us. With this we will definitely do something, but it will take time.

One of the great things about working with our distributors: they are global companies. Even when everything is not perfect, when you have to pay extra, they are still available. After all, we have a kind of business: we do not make computers, we develop them, and then we license production.

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