Raspberry Pi Launches New Website For Its Hardware
In a surprise move, Raspberry Pi today announced that a new website has been created to support Raspberry Pi devices, sales and documentation. This marks a change from a single website from 2011 which served both educational outreach and sales. Another change is Raspberry Pi's social media presence, with the original Raspberry Pi twitter account focusing on the hardware, and another representing the charity and educational outreach of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Raspberry Pi Trading and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have long been separate entities. Raspberry Pi Trading is responsible for the hardware engineering and sales of Raspberry Pi while Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity that provides educational outreach such as learning resources and teacher outreach program "Picademy".
In two blog posts, one written by Liz Upton, executive director of communications for Raspberry Pi Trading, and another from Philip Colligan chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we learn that the division is a necessary step as the user base grows and their requirements change. The new raspberrypi.com website aims to serve those interested in the Raspberry Pi hardware and software and provides documentation and links to resellers offering official Raspberry Pi boards and accessories.
Some posts from the RaspberryPi.org blog have been transferred to the RaspberryPi.com news page. The former blog focuses on the education mission while the news page has the project ideas, magazines, product announcements, and other news.
Raspberry Pi said yesterday it would be pushing to get its miniature computers into more shops across Africa, admitting that its presence on the continent was limited to a single approved reseller with commercial ops in a few countries in southern Africa.
Writing on the company blog, Ken Okolo said he had been recently appointed to focus on building a network of resellers and partnerships across industry and the education sector in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Cameroon, and Uganda.
Previously Raspberry Pi was available through a South African reseller with "some commercial operations" in nearby countries, but the rest of the continent was vastly underserved, relying on e-commerce sites like Amazon and [Alibaba], and their high shipping rates, to dispatch the product from other parts of the globe.
According to Okolo, this burden "undermines [the] goal of ensuring affordability and availability across the continent."
Previously: Raspberry Pi Attracts $45m After Lockdowns Fuel Demand for PCs
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Raspberry Pi OS "Bullseye" is getting some changes to improve its robustness. Gone is the default user 'pi' with the default password of 'raspberry'. On first-boot, a setup wizard walks through setting a normal user with a regular password, though there are still options for headless installation. Among other improvements, it is now also possible to do the setup with a bluetooth mouse/keyboard exclusively. The old way required at least a wired mouse, if not also a wired keyboard, to connect first.
There are also mechanisms to preconfigure an image without using Imager. To set up a user on first boot and bypass the wizard completely, create a file called userconf or userconf.txt in the boot partition of the SD card; this is the part of the SD card which can be seen when it is mounted in a Windows or MacOS computer. This file should contain a single line of text, consisting of username:encrypted- password – so your desired username, followed immediately by a colon, followed immediately by an encrypted representation of the password you want to use.
Since it is a full general-purpose computer, other distros and even other operating systems are available for the Raspberry Pi. Slackware, LInux Mint, and Devuan are all among the distros which run well. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD also support at least some Raspberry Pi models. However, the official guides and tutorials all point to Raspberry Pi OS, which is a Debian derivative.
Previously:
(2022)
Long Interview with Eben Upton About Long Term Plans for RPi (journal entry)
(2022) Can't Get Hold of a Shiny New Raspberry Pi? Blame the Bots
(2022) Raspberry Pi 64-bit Armbian Gets New Release
(2021) Raspberry Pi Launches .com Website, Eyes Retail Expansion in Africa
(2021) The Ongoing Raspberry Pi Fiasco
The Telegraph reports that Raspberry Pi Trading has offloaded stakes to Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust in a move that values the operation at around $500m. Most manufacturing is able to be done in the UK, and last year's sales amounted to 7.1m units for a profit of £11.4m.
Lansdowne Partners' presence in the list of investors is less surprising than Ezrah Charitable Trust. The latter was founded by former Goldman Sachs vice-president and Farallon Capital Management partner David Cohen in 2016 to focus "on the poorest of the poor, especially in Africa" – an indicator that it may be the work of the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation that was of interest.
The Register mentions that the foundation's 2020 financials show an income of over £95.8m, up nearly double from the £49.5m it reported in 2019.
Raspberry Pi Trading makes the hardware, the magazines, the peripherals, and so on. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs the charitable programs.
Previously:
(2021) Two New Microcontroller Boards Released with Built In Displays
(2021) Raspberry Pi Begins Selling its RP2040 Microcontroller for $1
(2020) Raspberry Pi 4 Gets 8 GB RAM Model, Also 64-bit OS and USB Boot (Both in Beta)
and more.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @09:41AM
He sounded like a snake!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 07 2021, @10:39AM (9 children)
A Raspberry Pi really isn't so great as a desktop. For the cost of a monitor, mouse, keyboard, audio, and data storage, you can get a low end PC laptop. May be the best use of a Pi is as a headless server.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @11:16AM
If you already have the monitor and don't need much storage it's fine pricewise as a low end desktop. I'm surprised we're not seeing more blade boards [jeffgeerling.com] for the compute module.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday October 07 2021, @12:03PM (4 children)
You have to account for local markets. I don't know how it is in Africa, but I do know that the U.S. almost always enjoys cheaper components and systems than the UK, Europe, and Australia, as well as greater availability. Laptop prices have been elevated during the pandemic (e.g. $100 laptop tier becoming $150) although they should [archive.org] drop [arstechnica.com] soon.
For Pi, the biggest cost should be the display, but an adapter or two should get it to work with an already owned TV. I've been using a cheap 32 GB microSD card, but only filled around 12 GB, so I could be using a 16 GB card instead (that's the smallest sold anymore AFAIK). If audio can't go through the TV, you use the 3.5mm jack, Bluetooth, or USB.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday October 07 2021, @12:40PM (3 children)
The African nations as a group have several problems hindering ICT deployment. The two main ones are connectivity and electricity, with some overlap between those two.
Connectivity is an issue not just because of the pervasive corruption [internetgovernance.org] which is greater there than many other places, but also there is conflict between nations: Some of the countries do what they can to overcharge neighboring nations for bandwidth, so the effective network routes between individual African countries and ones on the other continents can be quite circuitous and inefficient. Then there is the fact that electricity is not available around the clock, every day of the year in many places. Some places have little to none at all. More than the Internet connectivity problems, power supply presents a greater barrier for the Raspberry Pi's teaching plans since the basic models do not come with batteries and even if the did, you'd still need either something for a screen or else a battery powered laptop to connect to.
It's not that bad everywhere, so perhaps those two factors were part of the reasoning behind the selection of the initial countries. It may be that they contain the most well-off cities or regions in regards to electricity and Internet. However, that's just a guess.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @03:35PM (2 children)
With the Pi 400, they've shown they're willing to experiment with different form factors.
So a battery powered RPi laptop isn't infeasible. Pinebook has shown it's possible in small quantities but if they were shipping hundreds of thousands to NGOs that would lower the cost over what Pine64 could achieve.
But as a non profit, they'd need to analyze why OLPC is no longer a thing - according to Wikipedia it was gamed by the Uruguayan government. Uruguay isn't a poor, impoverished, African country. By Latin American standards it's pretty darn middle class. Rather, it and surrounding nations have hideously expensive consumer electronics - to which a populist government said we'll fix this by providing every kid with a computer.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday October 07 2021, @04:01PM (1 child)
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia in areas of politics, especially M$ politics. Uruguay may have been a kick while they were down, but only after they were already down. The OLPC had trouble immediately starting once Intel and M$ got representatives on the board and moved the project to a power-hungry, expensive Intel CPU and generally bloated the specs until it well exceeded the expected unit price. Then they had their advertising partners write loads of articles laughing about it, killing its reputation as well. There was a partially successful buy-one-give-one campaign, but even with that in place, M$ and Intel had succeeded in killing the project. The Raspberry Pi is no longer in the clear as they have at least one microsofter on their board now. So anything bad can happen from within, even though there is a lot of potential for good.
With the Pi 400, they've shown they're willing to experiment with different form factors.
I wouldn't be surprised either if they were to come up with some actual notebooks soonish. There are already kits [raspberrypi.org] for older models. A compute module 4 could easily form the heart of something portable and battery powered. Other projects, like the Pinebook [pine64.org] you mention and the TERES [olimex.com], have already shown there is a market. Raspberry Pi has the visibility and connections to do better than any of those.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 08 2021, @04:49AM
It wasn't just that. I don't know who drove it, but there was a concerted effort to keep them out of the hands of non-third-worlders. My suspicion is that it was part of the Intel deal that no westerners would get them. They had assembly hackers lined up saying "that looks really cool, can I buy one and I'll help write programs for it?".
Negroponte's answer was a flat "NO! They are only for poor kids." ,
Hacker, "But I'll pay extra, help fund things, write really fast programs",
Negroponte, "NO!".
Eventually he caved in to the G1G1 program (where I got mine), but it was too little, too late.
The Sugar software it shipped with was lacking in features and very slow. A 433MHz processor and 1GB of RAM and it was far slower and less capable than my 7MHz, 1MB Amiga.
The hardware itself wasn't too bad, with decent programming the thing could have been awesome fun. I still boot mine occasionally, the WiFi had a great range.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday October 07 2021, @12:16PM (1 child)
<mode fanboi_hat="on">
It's a matter of choosing the right job for the tool, so to speak. While either of the newest models of the Raspberry Pi will make an adequate desktop, that's not the goal. The goal is about teaching people, especially youth, how to really use computers and about providing an environment conducive for learning ICT. Flicking thumbs at a phone is not mastering anything. On the increasingly rare desktop, remember that the locked-down, illogical, undocumented Windows ecosystem got us here and caused a dire shortage of ICT skills among incoming college students, lacking even the basic concepts [pcgamer.com] let alone actual skills. That has been caused by the unpleasant situation we are in now, globally, with the prevalence of Windows on the desktop. It's all but impossible to learn anything about computing on a Windows computer, especially one that is shared within a household and can't be exposed to a greater risk of breaking. That has resulted in a couple of generations not being able to pick up computing knowledge on their own at home.
Keep in mind that the very purpose of the Raspberry Pi is to make it possible to progress smoothly along the learning curve from absolute beginner to most advanced. It has done really well at that. Between the Raspberry Foundation [raspberrypi.org] and Raspberry Pi Trading [raspberrypi.com], they have the computers and supplemental training materials covered. Some of the extra money from the computers is plowed into pedagogical resources. The rest seems to go back into advancing the product line. There's a dedicated magazine [raspberrypi.org] with actual working source code in darn near each and every article, and one for educators [raspberrypi.org]. There are also various code clubs, project showcases, books, and courses -- all over the place. All are easily accessible.
The Raspberry Pi hardware is powerful enough to be a recognizable general-purpose computer, complete with a graphical desktop if needed, but cheap enough to be affordable as a spare for experimenting with either the software or the hardware. Fixing the system is as simple as reflashing the removable microSD card. So there is little to no risk when messing with the software. Under minimal supervision, messing with the hardware is low risk. Lowering the barriers like that facilitates experimentation and thus learning.
</mode>
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @01:44PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Freeman on Thursday October 07 2021, @01:48PM
To a certain extent, you are correct. The difference is that you can buy a new upgraded raspberry pi when it's released and reuse the monitor, mouse, keyboard, audio, and data storage. Whereas when you buy a new laptop, you're just buying a new laptop. Also, I have a hate*infinity relationship with cheap laptops.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"