hi I'm Alistair Allan with meek here at
me Kirko and talking to eben Upton the
founder of Raspberry Pi morning good to
be here excellent so you just given you
talk and he talked about how the
Raspberry Pi started out and how it was
a response to the the drop in
applications to study CS at Cambridge
yeah so so this was really weird for us
about about 10 years ago we found a cell
singing Cambridge which thinks of its
Eiling with good reason that's being
kind of the premier institution for
doing via science and engineering in the
UK and looking around and struggling to
find enough 17 and 18 year olds who
wanted to come to our university to
study computer science yeah so the
applications have recovered since then
yeah and so applications have actually
now recovered from the fell from about
500 in the high of the dot-com boom to
maybe two hundred and two thousand eight
they've now rebounded to six or seven
hundred as I said in my talk I really
want to claim all the credit for that I
think what's actually happened is I
bribed kind of a broad coalition of
organizations who are interested in STEM
education also the broader kind of make
a movement this broader trend towards
young people thinking that it's a cool
thing to do to try and go out and build
stuff has really given us back that
supply of talented teenagers that we
have the we last saw in the 1980s that's
really awesome and you said that the
success of the Raspberry Pi is let you
do things that you would otherwise have
been able to do you want to talk about
that briefly yeah I deal with raspberry
pi Liam we were just trying to reboot
we're trying to solve a very local
little problem right we we thought if we
get a thousand or else replies into
hands at the right thousand kids then
we'd be we'd be set we have our extra
few hundred applicants a year what the
success of Raspberry Pi and the the fact
we've been able to make rum a consult
Raspberry Pi profitably has done it has
given us access to a source of revenue
that we then being able to reverse
because we're a charity now that money
comes on Ferraris for me and all or
Tesla's don't know but that's given us a
source of revenue we've been able to
invest in things like educational
resources and we now got a large present
organization a large producer of free
educational resources in the making area
we've also been able to invest in things
like teacher training and even things
like you know government relations you
know we have an
that we have time to go and talk to
government and really the UK government
other governments really trying to
explain to them why why we have a
problem why we have a problem and what
they should be doing to try and fix it
okay and one of the things you talked
about quite extensively was the on
shirring of production the pulling the
Raspberry Pi out of China and making it
in South wheels I thought that was a
really interesting points move you want
to talk about that yeah we like
everybody else when we started may try
make a cheap thing we thought unless we
go make it in Chen Zhen great
realization for us is we can make it
more cheaply we build raspy behind the
UK and we don't build it in Munich acres
we're nice guys we build in UK because
with cheapskates it is a cheaper place
to build for a low touch product like
raspberry pie and I think a lot of other
products in that kind of maker kind of
make a pro kind of area qualify as low
touch they're often bear PCB assemblies
without a case not model not a lot of
you there isn't 10 minutes of assembling
tiny fiddly screws whatever else we
pride together I think pretty much every
product in that space if you're prepared
to do the work if you're prepared to do
the optimization work on the design to
make it suitable for manufacture if you
just if you just take it a device that's
being designed to be built in an area
with low labor costs and you bring that
device to that product and that
production process you bring those to
the west you bring those to a high labor
costs economy you're going to lose money
but it's almost always possible to take
your product redesign it and redesign
the production process generally some
more automation so that you can make it
not just at the same price in the West
now but more cheaply that's really
interesting so is there anything in
particular in raspberry pi that you had
to re-engineer when you moved it back on
shore into the UK um there was a lot of
there was a lot of work in terms of a
lot of it I would say it's test
engineering so the majority of the touch
in raspberry pi the traditional
raspberry pi production process was
around test so take a raspberry past the
end of the line you're breaking out of
this panel connect stuff up to it
manually run a test program I like check
the output on the screen you know tick a
box and put it and took a box and packet
and what's happened what you've seen
happening over the last two and a half
years that we've been building around
behind the UK is steadily more and more
and more automation generally what we've
done is we've taken the savings of the
automation and we've invested them back
in the product so what you saw us do is
you saw us go from 256 make 2 512
negative memory you saw this guy from
two years to be
ports to four USB ports and then
recently obviously using raspberry pi 2
and so all of those are really a result
of us going and going and while
maintaining about the same production
costs you have a pack more and more and
more stuff into the Bill of Materials ok
that's really awesome so the raspberry
PI's really become quite ubiquitous it's
one of the mainstays of the maker
movement and because that wasn't
original intention obviously but is
pretty much everywhere including the
International Space Station negative
rights the same ones of space yeah we
are we are most of the way through Sarah
Dave Honus from the foundation and
Jonathan Balfour must be by training the
from the engineering organization I've
spent the last six months slogging
through the process of getting Raspberry
Pi qualified to fly an International
Space Station obviously the ISS is the
single most expensive thing mankind has
ever built they are understandably
nervous about letting guys like a
sticker thing in it in case it makes a
hole in it or you know all worth and so
there's there's there's a flight
approvals process we are now almost all
the way through the flight approvals
process and we've over the last couple
of months been running a competition for
schoolchildren in the UK to suggest
either ideas for experiments that they
want tim peake UK user astronaut Tim
Peake to run with the Raspberry Pi or in
the case of secondary school students
actually writing the code that's going
to roll on the pie in space that's
absolutely awesome s amazing I saw the
the case design was released today on
the glove it's fantastic yeah it's some
kind of amazing kind of steampunk thing
yeah it's got these wonderful it's got a
the the sense hat which is the the you
know the sensor package that kids have
access to you know they write their
programs against has a little joystick
on it but obviously you can't get that
whole joystick out somewhere with the
astral can touch it so what we have
instead is the world's most steampunk
d-pad which consists of these four giant
clicky buttons that you click click
click click it n to a B and D pad so
yeah we want to make it so if you put
the konami code in maybe you know then
you get it will do something interesting
something hopefully not too dangerous
that's absolutely awesome thanks for
talking to us thanks very much