Raspberry Pi Geek Information

Eben: The foundation's mission is to get more children computing by any means necessary. We've been running since 2009 - based in Cambridge. We've done some fun stuff. RPG: What about the future of Raspberry Pi? Where do you see it going to? At the moment it's a raging success. Eben: It's going to become more of a success! Was that a trick question? It's going to decline? RPG: Just wondered if you had any visions for the future. Eben: We want to make the software better. I think that goes without saying. The nice thing that we've discovered is that we've got this platform that's really worth our spending the money on it. It's a software story at least for the next couple of years. Gordon: Trying to turn it into almost something like a building block system, so that people can take our libraries. We are trying to create libraries and improve them, so that people can have a look and put some ideas together. They can see that they can use a library or a series of libraries and create an application. That's something that we are trying to push forward. RPG: Take a brilliant idea, make it better. Eben: Try to find out what the users want and invest money in it. A good example of this is Smalltalk [5]. It's a minority interest language, but there's a vast amount of information in it for educational use a lot of people use [it] for teaching young kids. So, we've been spending a surprisingly large amount of time and money on making Smalltalk run well on Pi. There's probably four or five of those things that we need to improve, such as making the web browser run quickly. There are others which the community are working on. Eben ended our meeting by giving the customary demonstration of the Raspberry Pi. He showed the five-megapixel camera that works with the Pi. Many projects out there are great to work on and do not require much effort to produce a working gadget. The Raspberry Pi offers a great way to learn or teach about electronics or software. The day before this interview took place HRH Prince Andrew visited ...