Interview with Raspberry Pi Foundation Director, Eben Upton:
Tell us more about your charity work and why you chose to design the
Raspberry Pi device to further that charity?
A group of us in Cambridge became concerned that the quality and quantity of applicants to the Computer Science course at the University here was falling year on year, to the point that it was becoming hard to fill the course with good candidates. This in turn has had a knock-on effect on the ability of firms in the Cambridge area to recruit graduates.
There are likely several causes for the decline in applicant numbers, but one factor is the lack of a cheap programmable home computer of the sort that I grew up with in the 1980s. We formed the Raspberry Pi Foundation to develop such a machine.
What main applications are you designing the Raspberry Pi device?
We began by designing it to be cheap, reasonably powerful (especially on the multimedia side), easy to program and easy to interface to external components. As time has gone on, we've also ended up with a device that can support general-purpose productivity apps as well.
What applications do you feel designers might use the Raspberry Pi device for instead and are you OK with that?
We've seen an enormous range of applications proposed, from HAM radio to aerospace. Of course, we're very happy with people doing pretty much whatever they want with the device.
Who are your competitors and why do you believe your device is better?
Our obvious competitors are devices like Beagleboard and Arduino. We're cheaper than Beagleboard, and offer better processing and multimedia capabilities than either. Our interfacing is weaker than Arduino, but we'll be addressing this through add-on boards.
Do you think your device might be a good fit for personal robotics builders to use for their robots?
Absolutely.
Are there a certain robotics application that you might envision the Raspberry Pi device would be best for?
Applications which require a lot of comput[ation], or which want to utilize a camera for machine-vision tasks (this last is dependent on our solving certain business-model issues involved in distributing a camera with the device).
Cheers
Eben Upton
Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Derudover tilføjer intervieweren:
In the interview, I'm hearing computer vision, daughter boards for various control applications and that it will blow away many hobbyist boards that are common today. Not to mention that just about any USB device that works with Linux should also work on this device. This all sounds like it could be a great future for robotics!
Many thanks again to Director, Eben Upton for the interview and we look forward to when the Raspberry Pi device begins to go on sale later this year.
Udover at det kan bruges til at lave alskens robotstyringer, og den slags, vil den også kunne bruges som en rigtig computer.
Jeg kan fortælle at vi i Bodhi Linux har et godt øje til Raspberry Pi, hvor vi mener at Raspberry Pi Model A, og i særdeleshed Model B af Raspberry Pi med 256 MB RAM, og Ethernet (trådet netværk) er meget velegnet som hardware for Bodhi Linux.
Jeff, head developer for Bodhi Linux, har skrevet at han vil snakke med Esben om at få Bodhi Linux som den distro der leveres med Raspberry Pi.
/Lars, der er Bodhi Linux udvikler
