The manufacturer of minicomputers is planning this for 2021
After the market launch of five devices in less than a year and continued strong demand, the British manufacturer intends to focus primarily on software this year.
Raspberry Pi is one of the winners of the corona crisis. As a result of the lockdowns, the demand for the minicomputers had skyrocketed overnight, as it were. Despite the pressure that the corona crisis had put on supply chains, the manufacturer managed to implement its impressive pipeline of products according to plan.
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Raspberry PI brings 5 devices in one year
After the introduction of the high-quality camera of the Raspberry Pi in April 2020, the company was able to bring the Raspberry Pi 4 with eight gigabytes of RAM onto the market one month later. This was followed by the Compute Module 4, the Raspberry Pi 400 and, most recently, the four-dollar Raspberry Pi Pico in January of this year.
Raspberry Pi was one of those companies that felt the effects of moving work into your own four walls overnight in 2020. Households for which one computer might have been enough for the whole family in normal times had to rethink. Suddenly there were several family members who had to work or study from home at the same time.
The affordable Raspberry Pi came in handy for many potential customers. After all, they could buy the power of a simple desktop in a compact form factor for under $ 50. This quickly became noticeable in the demand.
New Raspberry PI are enjoying massive demand
In March 2020, sales of Raspberry Pi devices reached 640,000 units. It was the second largest sales month in the company’s history. Over the full year 2020, Raspberry Pi sold 7.1 million units. That confirmed Raspberry Pi boss Eben Upton Techrepublic.
The Raspberry Pi 400. (Image: Raspberry Pi)
One of the most radical new products in the Raspberry Pi family of 2020 – especially in terms of design – was the Pi 400. Released in November, the Pi 400 took the company’s flagship Raspberry Pi 4 and built it into a keyboard . It combined a small footprint with tight budgets and thus fit perfectly into the corona requirements.
That was pure coincidence, according to Upton. After four years of existence as a mere idea, the point in time for the introduction simply came about. In March 2021, Raspberry Pi sold between 300,000 and 400,000 units of the Pi 400. Increasing production volumes pose a number of problems for the manufacturer. Up to now, the production process has not been fully automated, and certain parts of manual production have so far been unavoidable.
“The Pi 400 has to be built in the plastic shell. There are screws in it. You have to mount the heat sink on it and put the whole thing together. It’s still a manual process, ”says Upton, describing the problem.
Raspberry PI is also involved in charitable organizations
In addition to its own hardware portfolio, Raspberry Pi has been involved in a number of charitable and social initiatives over the past year – from providing devices that help underprivileged school children study from home to shipping devices around half way World to be used in ventilators for Covid-19 patients.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has now delivered more than 5,000 Raspberry kits as part of the “Learn at Home” fundraiser campaign. The British charity Bloomfield Trust took over the financing. The company also sells kits direct to schools or offers wholesale pricing to local charities who then put the devices into the hands of children and parents.
“What they can do with a $ 60 Raspberry is huge compared to what they could do with a cheap Chromebook. And cheap Chromebooks are rubbish, ”says Upton. “People work from home, study from home. That’s a huge part of the business now. ”The new Raspberry Pi Pico is the first product in the microcontroller class in its range of devices and also the first to use the company’s own custom CPU. The Raspberry Pi Pico enjoyed great popularity shortly after it was launched. At the beginning of March 2021, Raspberry Pi had already shipped 200,000 units and an order backlog of 700,000 units was behind schedule.
Retail sale of the underlying chip, the RP2040, will begin later this year and is targeting what Upton calls “fairly aggressive price point”. The start of sales, however, depends on the supply chains continuing to relax.
Home office is not a suitable model for Raspberry Pi
While 2020 was commercially successful for Raspberry Pi, the company itself was not spared the effects of the corona crisis. Work mainly took place via home office. Only engineers who couldn’t do their work elsewhere were allowed (and had to) drive to the office.
“We have expensive equipment that needs to be recalibrated when you move it, so it has to stay in the lab,” explains Upton, adding, “We don’t really believe that you can do effective engineering remotely. You could argue that the last year has shown that you can do effective engineering remotely, but I think you can only do it with people who have already grown into a team. “
For the current year, Raspberry Pi does not have any hardware pipeline even remotely as massive in view. When it comes to hardware, 2021 could be downright quiet. Regarding the Raspberry Pi 5, Upton says: “We’re thinking about it. We’re not quite sure what it will look like yet. “
2021: Raspberry Pi takes care of the software platform
In any case, the manufacturer wants to concentrate on software. To start with, Raspberry Pi aims to migrate its own software platform to Debian 11 by the middle of the year. “This will bring updates to many parts of the system, most notably the adoption of many of the optimizations to the Mesa 3D graphics stack that we have promoted over the years,” said Upton.
The updated software platform should also bring the Raspberry PI closer to the forefront of browser development. Upton promises that customers will get “really the fanciest Chromium” on their Raspberry Pi. The latest version of Chromium brings the ability to hold video conferencing, for example. This is one of the killer features in the new normal of the changed world of work.
“We are now on Chromium 88, right at the limit of what is possible,” says Upton. “This is really important because many video conferencing platforms are very aggressive about using the latest browser functions. And when we say we have a great platform to work from home, then we have to support conference platforms too. “
Raspberry PI customers obviously have an exciting year ahead of them with many new software features. Even if Raspberry boss Upton compares the work on the software platform with a treadmill, he is confident that he will be able to cope with the massive effort. His team is making good progress with multimedia integration. He even wants to experience a similar euphoria as at the beginning of the Raspberry development around 2012.
