The Raspberry Pi Celebrates Its 10th Birthday!

The Raspberry Pi is officially 10 years old! On the 29th of February 2021, the original Raspberry Pi Model B went on sale, with the first 10000 units selling out immediately and completely breaking their website. It was an instant hit, and it changed everything.

Under a year later, with 700,000 units sold, the now ubiquitous single-board computers were showing up in every corner of the hobby computing sphere, becoming a mainstay in DIY electronics, and finding it's way into all kinds of early IoT projects.

Happy Birthday, Pi! We never stopped tinkering with you, but we'll be tinkering wistfully in your honor today!

Small Boards, Big Changes

It's hard to imagine a world without cheap, powerful Raspberry Pi boards, but it's important to acknowledge that it's not just the hardware that's important here. Like the whole Arduino project, Raspberry Pi has stayed a firm favorite for a single reason: Community.

The sheer number of people who took it upon themselves to create easy-to-use libraries with great documentation is what has made the hobby and maker community surrounding embedded programming what it is today. 

Add to this the important work the Raspberry Pi Foundation does for educating young people, giving opportunities to learn by doing, and it's no surprise that 10 years on we still all love the Raspberry Pi!

Have you got a spare Pi sitting around and are wondering what to do with it? Well, they can be used as anything from a Wifi repeater and access point to the brains behind artificial life simulations. Alternatively you could use one to play Atari tennis with a real bat, or just create an automatic, face tracking, ping-pong ball launcher!

If you like stories from the Electrowire, you'll love the Electromaker Show, our weekly round-up of all things Maker and Embedded. Join us on YouTube or on all major podcast services.