Arduino’s Playmate
The $25 Raspberry Pi will do for computing what Arduino has done for robotics
IEEE Spectrum
BY Steven Cherry // Wed, April 18, 2012
This is an exciting time for do-it-yourselfers.
Last October, Spectrum ran a feature article about Arduino. Here’s what we said.
Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world….
Arduino has spawned an international do-it-yourself revolution in electronics. You can buy an Arduino board for just about US $30 or build your own from scratch: All hardware schematics and source code are available for free under public licenses. As a result, Arduino has become the most influential open-source hardware movement of its time.
Lightning is about to strike twice in the open-source hardware movement, with the release of Raspberry Pi. For $25, you can get the guts of an entire computer—a single board with a microprocessor, Wi-Fi, [Wi-Fi can be added through the USB port] and inputs for video, USB, and an SD card. Interest has been intense—the initial launch on February 29th briefly crashed the Raspberry Pi website, and people have been signing up as quickly as once every 6 seconds.
My guest today is the founder of Raspberry Pi, Eben Upton. He’s a chip architect at Broadcom, which also makes the chip that’s at the heart of the board. He joins us by phone from Cambridge, England.
Eben, welcome to the podcast. (listen below)