Interesting facts about Raspberry Pi

Last updated on March 8, 2014 by Dan Nanni

Raspberry Pi celebrated its second birthday last week. Since its debut on February 29, 2012, Raspberry Pi has ushered in a whole new generation of tiny, inexpensive, single-board computers. Numerous Raspberry Pi based DIY project ideas are popping up over the web, and there are many use cases of Raspberry Pi as low-cost learning media in the developing world. Celebrating its second birthday, I am going to share in this post several interesting facts about Raspberry Pi.

1. 100,000 Raspberry Pi boards were sold on the first day of launch, and more than 2.5 million units of them have been sold so far worldwide.

2. Initial batches of Raspberry Pi boards were made in Taiwan and China, but now all Raspberry Pi boards being sold are manufactured in the UK.

3. Raspberry Pi is overclockable (by entering so-called turbo mode). You can change overclocking/overvolting options either at run-time with raspi-config tool, or at boot-time by editing boot-time parameters in /boot/config.txt. Changing overclocking/overvolting options does not void your warranty.

4. Raspberry Pi does not come with MPEG-2 decoder. Adding a blanket license for MPEG-2/VC-1 codecs to Raspberry Pi would increase its board price by 10%. Instead, you can purchase MPEG-2/VC-1 license keys only if you need to. Purchased licenses are tied to individual Raspberry Pi boards.

5. You cannot run Windows 8 on Raspberry Pi (ARMv6) as Windows 8 requires an ARMv7 or higher processor. Likewise, you cannot run Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi as Ubuntu only supports ARMv7 or higher.

6. Origin of the name Rapberry Pi: "Raspberry" originates from the fruit-based naming tradition for microcomputers in old days. "Pi" refers to "Python" because Python was one of the first programs ported to run on Raspberry Pi.

7. Raspberry in the Raspberry Pi logo is actually 3D Buckminsterfullerene (or bucky-ball) which has a total of 32 faces. 11 of them are visible in the logo. Co-incidentally, Raspberry Pi has a 32-bit ARM11 processor on board.

8. Mathematica, a popular computational software program commercially available, comes bundled for free on Rapsberry Pi.

9. The biggest Kickstarter project which is based on Raspberry Pi is Kano, where the goal is to delivery a computer/coding kit which can help people of all ages make a computer themselves. The project has garnered $1,522,160 from 13,387 backers.

10. According to Rastrack.co.uk, the country where RaspberryPi is the most popular is UK.

That is all. If you know any interesting fact about Raspberry Pi, feel free to chime in.

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