Raspberry Pi A, User Manual, Page: 24 / 314

R A S P B E R R Y P I
U S E R G U I D E , S E C O N D E D I T I O N
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hand over to somebody else who already had the infrastructure and capital to do that, so we
got in touch with element14 and RS Components, both UK microelectronics suppliers with
worldwide businesses, and contracted with them to do the actual manufacture and distribu-
tion side of things worldwide so we could concentrate on development and the Raspberry Pi
Foundation’s charitable goals.
Demand on the first day was still so large that RS and element14’s websites both crashed for
most of the day—at one point in the day, element14 were getting seven orders a second, and
for a couple of hours on February 29, Google showed more searches were made worldwide
for “Raspberry Pi” than were made for “Lady Gaga”. We made and sold more than a million
Raspberry Pis in the first year of business, making Raspberry Pi the fastest-growing com-
puter company in the world, ever. Things aren’t slowing down: we sell more than 100,000 Pis
every month. If we’d stuck with our original plans, we’d have made 100 or so of these devices
for University open days, and that would have been it.
NOTE
The first production Pis were made in Chinese factories, but in the last year we have managed
to repatriate all of the production to the UK. Your Raspberry Pi is now made in South Wales,
in an area of the country with a proud manufacturing heritage, but few remaining factories.
Amazingly, it costs us the same to manufacture in Wales as it did in China, and we’re able to
do that manufacture without a language or cultural barrier, and with the ability to jump in the
car and be on the factory floor in a few hours if necessary.
There is nothing that affects the blood pressure quite like accidentally ending up running a
large computer company!
So What Can You Do with the Raspberry Pi?
This book explores a number of things you can do with your Raspberry Pi, from controlling
hardware with Python, to using it as a media centre, setting up camera projects, or building
games in Scratch. The beauty of the Raspberry Pi is that it’s just a very tiny general-purpose
computer (which may be a little slower than you’re used to for some desktop applications,
but much better at some other stuff than a regular PC), so you can do anything you could do
on a regular computer with it. In addition, the Raspberry Pi has powerful multimedia and 3D
graphics capabilities, so it has the potential to be used as a games platform, and we very
much hope to see more people starting to write games for it.