Portrait of an Inventor
Just before the launch of Raspberry Pi 2, RS Components, one of our two main manufacturing/distribution partners, sent a film crew to point some cameras at Eben for the day to talk about the history of Pi, about the new device, and about what we do. (He had a cold, which is why he sounds like Darth Vader.) This is the resulting video – we hope you like it!
34 comments
Peter Onion
Eben is becoming quite the media star :-)
I don’t think I’ve seen this radio interview mentioned in thos blog before ?
http://cambridge105.fm/podcasts/gadget-guide-13-02-2015/
PeterO
AndrewS
Hope you’re feeling better now, Darth Upton!
Dave Akerman
I now have this vision of a BBC Model B saying “Pi, I am your father”
Alan McCullagh
“Mmm JedPI knight will you be”
Liz Upton
One day I really ought to look into a way for people to upvote comments here…
Alan McCullagh
+1
Jonathan Morris
I upvote this statement.
Lorna
Eoin and I both upvote this!
Shannon Spurling
“Pi, I am your father!”
“NoooooooooOo!” :-)
aremvee
With this one, the force is strong
Jim Manley
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
def upvote(comment):
comment = comment.join(comment)
print comment
i = 0;
while (i < sys.maxsize):
upvote("Liz Upton says: 17th Feb 2015 at 1:30 pm - One day I really ought to look into a way for people to upvote comments here ... ")
i += 1
:D++
Jim Manley
Awww, rats, leading spaces are suppressed (even in a code segment, which the formatter is supposed to LEAVE UNMOLESTED!) and now my lovely Python code is all squished to the left margin, rendering it gibberish to the Python interpreter due to lack of indentation. If there’s a way to fix that, I’d be much obliged to Ye Olde Moderators :)
John
Wow, such a great video! Very well done!
Alan McCullagh
“Bold and Persistent”
Wonder if they have it with French subtitles too! ;o)
The Raspberry Pi Guy
Brilliant video!
Pete
0.04 – 0.07 … Made me laugh! … Grandads gone out in his slippers again and we’ll have to search for him in case he goes joy riding on a bus again !…
on a serious note.
Please tell me you guys are going to get your own TV show on the BBC soon. Eban and co have something to contribute to British culture I think!
xp
W. H. Heydt
Very nice.
Odd question… When did Eben do the interview with the BBC for the Pi2 launch article? (Last half of January, I would assume>0 It that interview he mentioned that sales were at
4.5 million, then Liz mentioned (in a blog post) that 300K Pi2Bs sold the first week. Thus, I conclude that the Pi must be very close to a total sales volume of 5 million.
Is the Pi going to pass the Spectrum by the end of February?
Liz Upton
I might have something to say about that in a blog post tomorrow. Watch this space!
alecthegeek
I think some parts of the media have already broken your embargo. Congrats on 5×10^6 units.
I’m sure my family think sometimes that most of them are lying around our house.
Liz Upton
No embargo – we actually tweeted about it earlier today. We’re very chuffed at the news!
Bill Stephenson
I love listening to Eben talk about the Pi.
It’s telling that he mentions the increase in applicants to Cambridge CS classes as a measure of the Pi’s success. I recall him mentioning the low numbers being a motivation to create the Pi, and when I heard that I was taken by what that really meant.
Turning that around in such a short time is truly amazing, and I love that this, after the widespread success of the Pi, is still the measure Eben’s excited about. What this will lead to is impossible to know right now, but I have no doubt that ever more amazing things will result.
(P.S. Send more B 2s to the U.S asap. I’m still waiting for one ;) )
Phil Spiegel..
Reading the (automatic) subtitles is great fun 8-)
And that was English to English.
AndrewS
“boris has been successful spalla” sent tears of laughter rolling down my face!
AndyD
Thanks for pointing that out. Automatic subtitles … hilarious.
Dave Akerman
LOL. I think I should change my name to “Old Spice Thai Akerman” :-)
Gee ‘The Rabid Inventor’ Bartlett
ROFLMAO literally. and with a cold i’ve ended up sounding like a wheezing Hinayana :)
Tim
5 Million! A+ and Pi2 must have sold a million between them since Q4 last year then!
cornelius
Darth Vader? – Jeremy Clarkson more like:)
Jim Manley
“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Ebenprise. His continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out the high life and improve civilizations, to boldly persist where no one has persisted before … ” ;)
With a knighthood already surely in his future at some undefinable point, we need to start a campaign to get a spacecraft named for this bold and perspirant … I mean persistent … explorer and pioneer in science and engineering. Since Tim Peake will be on Mission Principia, a Mission Picipia can’t be far behind, right?
Poor Eben and Liz seem to come down with every bug in Murphy’s quiver – you two kids need to start living a more G-rated life or the next thing you know, we’ll be reading about the outbreak of some esoteric rapidly-communicable and deadly disease that’s been thought extinct for centuries, only to rear its ugly head because of something stuck to your shoes whilst traipsing about the planet. Be careful, or they might just slip you in as one of the crew going on the one-way trip to Mars in a number of years! That’s not quite the kind of spacecraft de(a)dication I was looking to promote, but as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?
Series-ously (who … ME??? :) the continued success of the Pi and managing to sneak the Pi2 out right at what many have been predicting would certainly be the inflection point in the demand curve into the toilet just says galaxies’ worth about how truly you all really do “get it” when it comes to helping foster a rekindling of interest in STEM education. This, just before we are about to be forced back into the Stone Age because not enough young people are sufficiently educated to invent, design, engineer, operate, and maintain the next generation of things like nuclear reactors, multi-Mach aircraft and deep-ranging spacecraft, submarines and unpiloted submersibles, and the Next Next Things in computing and communication, etc.
I am so happy to not only know people like you exist, but hono(u)red to be counted as just one of now certainly well over a million of your closest friends and yes, now family. We can’t wait to see what you have in store for us by February 2018!!! No pressure, BTW … but when will they ship and will the wheels and sandwich options finally be available? :D
All Our Very Best,
The Most Humbled and Thrilled Community … Ever!!!
Liz Upton
I’m really looking forward to being able to get together when we’re at Maker Faire Bay Area in May, Jim; make sure you put some time aside so we can grab dinner!
Jim Manley
You’ve gotta be kidding … setting aside time to have dinner with Hari Seldon, Dors Venabili, and the rest of the Foundation entourage coming to the Faire … what else could I possibly be doing Saturday evening after they toss us onto the crowded streets of San Mateo??? I’m so stoked that I’m looking for an excuse to visit my sister in September, who lives less than an hour from the NYC Faire venue, just in case you need yet-another straphanger to fill a vacant seat wherever the place to eat there is! Forward the Foundation, indeed! :D
sirkope
!Breaking News!
There’s a KickStarter project:
They collect pledges for their compute module based kits, and they estimated compute module 2 (quad core as RPi2) 2015 autumn:
“Pledge £99 or more
£99 starter kit which has PCB+ Quad core Compute V2+WiFi+SRF+ext antenna+Wireless keyboard/mouse/joypad+PSU+Case+HDMI cable
Estimated delivery: Sep 2015
Ships anywhere in the world ”
Is it real?
Liz Upton
They’re just guessing on CM2 release; we haven’t discussed that with anybody. It’s definitely on the cards, but we don’t have a set date at the moment for it.
sirkope
Dear Liz,
So they just thought logically, and they are close to the truth :)