We use some essential cookies to make our website work.

We use optional cookies, as detailed in our cookie policy, to remember your settings and understand how you use our website.

News

All news
Search the archive RSS feed

CamJam threw us a birthday party

Thanks to everyone who came to our third-cum-twelfth birthday party last weekend, thrown for us by CamJam. Here are some photos of the day so you can immerse yourself in the experience if you weren’t there, and relive the unadulterated joy if you were.

If this post is too long and you don’t want to read, watch our Matt’s quick TikTok recap instead. The guy’s a veritable Spielberg and captured the day perfectly
The Uptons’ favourite exhibit was this punching pad which registered the strength of your ire (and fists) and scrolled supportive messages on a tiny LED display
Upton the Younger especially liked the giant crystal mirror we shipped across town from Pi Towers. Here it is displaying one of the Valentine’s Day images our Maker in Residence Toby coded for display in the office lobby last month. You can read more about what it does thanks to this excellent blog post
Spot the Pi reviving this old Acorn computer
Upton the Youngest followed this hexapod robot around for ages. It was on display at Approved Reseller Pimoroni’s booth, but spent much of its time traversing the carpet of the building
Toby had an entire booth showcasing all the cool stuff to come out of the Maker Lab at Pi Towers: it included this giant Raspberry Pi which had previously been on display at the Grand Arcade in Cambridge as part of their Grand Discoveries event. You can read more about how he made it here.

Return to Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory

CamJam threw the party for us in the main foyer of Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory in the William Gates Building. It’s where Raspberry Pi’s CEO Eben Upton got his PhD, and where the foundations of Raspberry Pi were laid, as co-founder Pete Lomas described in his keynote.

Eben, Pete, and the other co-founders started Raspberry Pi because the room in the photo above in the William Gates Building was looking disappointingly empty around 2008. They wanted to offer low-cost hardware to get people into computing in the hope that some of them might end up studying Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. Last weekend, Eben returned with our CTOs, Gordon Hollingworth and James Adams, to speak at a packed Q&A during our birthday party.

This medal is also on display at the party venue. It’s the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, which was awarded to Raspberry Pi in 2017. It’s the UK’s top engineering prize and this is Eben’s personal medal, which is on loan to the Computer Lab and can be viewed in the glass cabinets on your right as you enter through the front doors of the building.

Huge thanks to CamJam for hosting this most excellent event full of old faces from the early days, plus a few new ones we’re so pleased joined us. It was amazing to go back to where we started to mark twelve whole years of Raspberry Pi.

Related posts

Our third (ish) birthday is coming up!

Happy Birthday to us

You can't eat our birthday cake because it is full of LEDs

Next Post

This phone charger only works when your eyes are closed

Previous Post

THEA500 Mini keyboard | #MagPiMonday

Share this post

Post to X Post to Facebook Post to Linkedin Post to Pinterest

6 comments

Wouter avatar

I did spot 2 Pi’s, but a third would be possible.
*PiTubeDirect
*RGBtoHDMI
*Pi1MHz

A Stevens avatar

I’d love to see a nice benchmark test of the BBC Master 128 vs an original Pi, and of course a Pi 5. That would be a fascinating exercise! I’m not sure how you would arrange this, but it’s fun to imagine the factor by which the tiny Pi boosts the performance of the BBC Master (which I had as my main computer from 1989-1992).

Anthony R. King avatar

You can’t tell what it actually does for the BBC as there’s no explanation. In what way is it ‘reviving’ it I wonder.

jozve avatar

A good birthday gift!

Ashley Whittaker avatar

We LOVED it

Anthony R. King avatar

Hey. If you were to go about making a fully-working up-scaled Pi like that, using the actual components within up-scaled enclosures, would it fail because of the excessive track lengths? Of course it would, but it would be very cool if it could be coerced to function.

You could then maybe have any parts like tracks, ethernet lines, USB lines, etc. illuminate on activity.

Comments are closed