
'We thought we'd sell 1,000': The inside story of the Raspberry Pi - dan1234
http://www.zdnet.com/we-thought-wed-sell-1000-the-inside-story-of-the-raspberry-pi-7000009718/
======
sharkweek
> _Putting these tools front and centre is designed to inspire tinkering._

I just got my first pi a few days ago -- I have had so much fun with it
already. I'm working on a list of a variety of things I can do with it, as it
has really sparked my creativity. I'll probably end up ordering several more
for various tinkering.

The possibilities are endless as to what these cheap but powerful devices will
allow the creative minds to come up with; very exciting!

~~~
mhurron
I'm getting one for a monitoring dashboard. It's unfortunate that it doesn't
have a VGA or DVI port (for me preferably VGA) and only has video output over
HDMI. It would seem that if you were creating a cheap computer to be used to
tinker and learn it would support video output that would be used to connect
it to inexpensive computer monitors.

Thankfully adapters aren't that expensive.

~~~
jlgreco
Most (all?) TVs being sold today support HDMI, so I think the thought is that
children don't have to buy a monitor too and can just plug these into their
parents TV.

~~~
mhurron
Maybe it's just me but it seems to me that it would be more likely that
someone would get their hands on an inexpensive used monitor to tinker with
instead of using the family TV. An inexpensive monitor would also allow you to
set up basically anywhere in the house.

I know when I was growing up I would not have been able to tinker using the TV
for very long before someone else in the family would want to use the TV.

~~~
jff
There may be an old TV in the garage which can take input from the on-board
composite video output. Otherwise, it'll be $10 at Goodwill.

~~~
mark-r
I don't think Goodwill even takes them anymore, they just end up paying to
send them to the dump in the end. Their value has actually gone negative.

~~~
unimpressive
Garage sales. Those will have old TV's for the rest of the decade at least.

------
ChuckMcM
Does it bother anyone else that anyone who thought they would "only sell
1,000" had to be exceptionally dense? A blindness to the marketability of a
$35 linux computer stuns me, whoever that person is keep them them the hell
away from the strategy sessions :-)

When they announced it I, and every single 'senior' engineer I talked to said
exactly the same thing, "If they can pull this off they will sell millions of
these." Granted the engineers designing the Pi were in diapers when the Apple
II came out but a bit of history will show you that if you get a 10x jump in
price/performance on _anything_ the impact is large and profound. You can use
it as an iron clad variation of the mouse trap quote "If you can build a mouse
trap that is either 10x more effective, or 10x cheaper than the current
solution, you will capture a significant portion of the mousetrap market."

1,000 ? Really? Did they even _think_ about the Commodor VIC20 which was a
crap machine but met the mousetrap rule and sold several million units?

I'm glad they've pulled it off, I've got 15 Raspberry Pi boards (5 of the 256M
ones and 10 of the 512M ones) I have every reason to believe I can build any
of a number of products out of them that would sell in the range of 10,000 a
month. So they were just clueless. Now they know.

The next step will be more interesting. Looking for another ARM manufacturer
to take the bet, whether its Samsung or TI or maybe Applied Micro. Will be
interesting to see.

~~~
sown
> Does it bother anyone else that anyone who thought they would "only sell
> 1,000" had to be exceptionally dense? A blindness to the marketability of a
> $35 linux computer stuns me,

Not totally. There was beagleboard and other such systems that were also
popular with DIY/Makers, that could also run linux that could run fancy
graphics, and were $50-$100 but they never took off like Rasp Pi has. Perhaps
it was just the right time.

I also seem to remember that there were better PR. Words like 'credit-card
sized' and 'desktop replacement' seemed to appear along with RaspPi more often
whereas BeagleBoard had "embedded system" and "OMAP" and other technical
jargon. Less consumer oriented so journalists couldn't relate to it and hence
it didn't get as much exposure.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The BeagleBoard was a $150 board the Pandaboard $180, the "Chumby" was
hackable at around $150 but not HD video.

The price was important. It is below the 'impulse' buy price for gainfully
employed engineers. Most embedded systems are $200+ have complex setups,
usually a costly IDE setup. They presented a pretty step learning curve, and
even though valuable the challenge is the cost risk.

If you see a mousetrap that costs 1/10th your current mousetrap many folks are
inclined to at least try it :-)

~~~
sown
Hmm...I guess my memory isn't so keen. Maybe I was thinking of another system.
It was called 'cherry' something but it was under but closer to $100. But I
see your point.

Incidentally that 1/10th cost is one of the reasons I want to get into
designing hardware so if you have pointers on that, it'd be helpful. :)

~~~
gmrple
What kind of hardware(put parts on a pcb, design analog ICs, design digital
ICs, something else?), and what do you know already?

------
leoc
Two million dollars to design an open-source GPU on Kickstarter? Seems like an
obviously great idea, assuming that the people behind it are competent enough
GPU design, and that a mere $2m is actually enough. And that the project
wouldn't be patent-litigated into the ground, of course.

~~~
neolefty
He said 2M from _each_ of the people who complained ...

~~~
leoc
I don't think that was was what he meant; what he said ("I want $2m from all
the people who've criticised me") certainly doesn't have to be interpreted
that way.

------
sown
Hi,

I'd love to start making systems like Raspberry Pi.

How does one start designing entire system boards like this? I know digital
circuits and simple DC circuits.

What else do I need to know? I've heard of Eagle before but I don't know to do
board layout.

Is there a resource for a kernel engineer to go off and get started designing
hardware?

~~~
jff
The hardest part is probably going to be power. A lot of the rest is just
wiring up a bunch of components, which is complicated but not electronics-
heavy. Datasheets are your friend.

My first suggestion is to get a microcontroller like a PIC and design a
circuit board for something simple. Something like the SpiffChorder
(<http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/hardware>), which acts as a USB
chording keyboard with about a dozen components, might be a good start. Eagle
is free for small boards.

The biggest hurdle here is probably getting your boards made--it'll be
expensive and slow compared to everything else you're doing.

~~~
johansch
Power hard - how? It gets regulated 5V via Micro USB.

~~~
tcas
The power distribution on a board is essential to it running properly. The 5v
needs to go into 3.3v and probably 1.2-1.8v as well. You need to make sure
that any loads on the power net won't cause a momentary voltage drop below any
component's tolerance. You also want to make sure that the components on the
far end of the board will receive the same voltage that everything else is
receiving. Next you want to make sure that any digital chips won't inject
noise on the line and have their own power reserve via decoupling caps. These
capacitors need to be speced out to block specific frequencies and placed
accordingly. Also, grounding is super important to consider as you want to
have a stable "0V" reference (for digital only designs this means having a
dedicated ground plane, mixed analog and digital can have separate ground
planes).

Now, for most hobbyist designs the rule of thumb is use a simple LDO and the
recommended input/output caps (1-10uF) for it and use wide traces to route the
power in a star like fashion. Also put a 100nF capacitor next to each power
pin for noise and to serve as a power reserve.

More complicated circuits / circuits that will need to go through FCC will
require more complicated power distributions. Most professional boards (with
high frequency signals on it) that will meet FCC will be 4+ layers, with a
dedicated ground and power planes. A PCB I just designed with an FPGA on it
had something like 50 capacitors for just the 1 chip, with physical size
requirements for each type (the smallest capacitors were 1mm x 0.5mm to block
the highest frequency noise, anything bigger won't be as effective).

Don't let this deter you however, looking back on my first schematic/PCB
designs I'm amazed at how much better I've gotten. Microcontroller designs
with a few chips are very, very lenient. If you mess something up it will
likely still work, but your performance won't be as good (i.e. if you use a
built in ADC it may not be as accurate, or you might not be able to reliable
run it at it's max clock speed)

------
djhworld
I bought a Pi for unknown reasons initially. It's currently serving as a cheap
VPN server now though and is handy for running scripts that need to be on all
the time.

Perfect little "server" for £25, can't beat it really.

~~~
graue
I bought one for a NAS. Funny thing about the Pi as a server is, it's less
powerful than every client that will ever connect to it.

~~~
takluyver
That's not that new for servers - home NAS boxes don't need much computing
power, routers & printers are often HTTP servers to allow configuration, and
there are those plug computers that presumably get used as servers.

~~~
graue
Yeah. It's funny in my case, though. I'm writing a music streaming web app and
not sure yet if the RPi will be able to transcode formats in real-time, so
have pondered using decoders in JavaScript, e.g. [1], instead. Normally this
would be an obvious task to do on the server side.

[1]: <https://github.com/ofmlabs/flac.js>

------
VolatileVoid
Perhaps this isn't the best place for this question, but I know that this is a
community of hackers and I can't think of a better audience for it.

I've been eyeing a Raspberry Pi board for some time, but I can't think of what
I'd like to do with it. I have NO background in EE - I'm really just a
programmer. But I think it would be cool to, say, somehow make a raspberry pi
turn my house lights on and off remotely (or via some timer). Now I know that
there's the GPIO port on the Pi, but... how do I use it? How do I wire it up?

I think that's my biggest challenge. I have lots of old electronics, and
potential uses for the Raspberry Pi, but I haven't the faintest clue about how
to wire it all together. Perhaps I'm way out of my element, but I don't even
know where to get started. I'd love to see very, very simple Rapsberry Pi
hacks using the GPIO ports to interface with existing electronics, so I can
get some ideas and so I can learn.

I guess what I'm saying is: I think the Raspberry Pi is really cool for
hardware hacks, but I've not got the faintest clue about where to start - only
that I want to start somewhere! Does anyone have any ideas?

~~~
akavel
<http://elinux.org/RPi_Hub> tries to collect many links about RPi, with eye on
beginners coming from different worlds. It really has plenty of highly
valuable information; maybe not exactly easiest to navigate, but tries hard,
and succeeding here is probably not an easy task to achieve in the end.

[edit] In simpler words: if googling doesn't help me, that's the second place
I try to search (and sometimes even the first, especially if I already know
the thing I need is there).

------
SoftwareMaven
My son and I want to start getting into robotics (probably starting with
mindstorm). I'd like to encourage him into programming. Is there a way I can
put the two of these together? Alternatively, if you had these interests/goals
as requirements, how would you solve them?

~~~
numbsafari
If you are more robotics oriented, start here: <http://www.arduino.cc/> and
skip the Pi.

~~~
gbog
why? you assume that they have a computer already.

~~~
numbsafari
Um... he did post to HN... so... yeah, I guess maybe he could be doing that
from the public library.

------
doctoboggan
I ordered a raspi and made an android controlled toy car. Now my company has
ordered 6 and we will be giving them away at PyCon this year.

Gauging by how badly I wanted one before they came out I could have told you
they'd sell significantly more than 10,000

------
leoc
Interesting glimpse of the nuances of the Broadcom/Raspberry Pi Foundation
relationship.

------
IheartApplesDix
This is pretty much an advertisement and the article hardly has any original
content. What is this article doing on HN? Raspberry Pi is a well funded start
up and the false modesty is really transparent.

~~~
jlgreco
A startup.... charity organization?

I mean, I suppose that could technically be considered a thing, but I don't
think it is really in the spirit of most startups considered in HN. It's not
like they are a profit driven enterprise.

~~~
johansch
Perhaps sort of like Mozilla are masquerading as a charity?

~~~
jlgreco
I see absolutely no evidence that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is unsavory in
any way.

