Raspberry aims at Internet of Things
Raspberry Pi now int IoT
The Raspberry Pi microcomputer was designed as a cheap educational tool that gets kids interested in coding – stole the hearts of many geeks when it arrived. They offer some low cost, robust and coder friendly boards and environment for developers and students.
The foundation has made over 7 million sales by now, and decided to enter the world of Internet of Things with its very own powerful boards customized and mass-produced for their environment.
Embedded Pi
Raspberry Pi inventor Eben Upton spoke at the launch and said he envisions small businesses embracing customised versions of the microcomputer, to put to work in gadgets such as media players or home automation hubs that communicate with all the other gadgets in your house. With high speed development going on in Home Automation and Security, this is the perfect time for the Embedded Giant.
While the option to mass-order custom Pi boards is unlikely to be of interest to huge companies such as Samsung or Microsoft, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hopes that Kickstarter-grade organisations looking for a computer to power their Internet of Things gadgetry will be tempted to put an order in. The customisation process could see connector ports added or removed, to make the Pi more suitable for bespoke purposes.
This customization service will be launched in coordination with Element14, its long term sales partner across the globe. Element14 after acquiring AVID and Embest, on which it will start to handle mechanical engineering and customized Pi boards.
Not for Hobbyist
While they are preparing for large sales across the globe, it is said that individual developers won’t be able to benefit much. The customization is more inclined towards the industries working or wanting to work in the Internet of Things domain. These industries will be their first priorities. Scaling along with them is what the people at Pi believe in.
“There’s an enormous amount of distributed creativity in the world. It’s one of the things that’s made Raspberry Pi successful,” Eben Upton said, describing the kind of small businesses he thinks will be interested in custom Pis.
“People have ideas for hobbyist things they want to do, people have ideas for products they want to build,” he said. “This — along with the mainline Raspberry Pi and the compute module — they’re ways of providing people with the ability to do these interesting things without having to get to a scale where they can justify building 500,000 or 1 million of something.”
Source: CNET
