Raspberry Pi Files Paperwork With The London Stock Exchange

May 17, 2024 by 27 Comments

If you’re a regular visitor to the Raspberry Pi website and you have a sharp eye, you may have noticed during the last few days a new link has appeared in their footer. Labelled “Investor relations“, it holds links to the documents filed with the London Stock Exchange of their intention to float. In other words, it’s confirmation of their upcoming share offering.

It has been interesting to watch the growth of Raspberry Pi over the last twelve years, from cottage industry producing a thousand boards in China, to dominating the SBC market and launching their own successful silicon. Without either a crystal ball or a window into Eben Upton’s mind, we’re as unreliable as anyone else when it comes to divining their future path. But since we’re guessing that it will involve ever more complex silicon with a raspberry logo, it’s obvious that the float will give them the investment springboard they need.

For those of us who have been around for a long time this isn’t the first company in our corner of the technology world we’ve seen burn brightly. It’s not even the first from Cambridge. Appointing ourselves as pundits though, we’d say that Raspberry Pi’s path to this point has been surprisingly understated, based upon the strength of its products rather than hype, and while Eben is undoubtedly a well-known figure, not based upon a cult of personality. There is already a significant ecosystem around Raspberry Pi, we’d like to think that this move will only strengthen it. We may not be looking at the British Microsoft, but we don’t think we’re looking at another Sinclair either.

Your Pi, From Anywhere

May 7, 2024 by 20 Comments

The Raspberry Pi finds a use in a huge variety of applications, and in almost any location you could imagine. Sadly those who use those machines might not be in the same place as the machines themselves, and thus there’s the question of providing a remote connection between the two. This may not be a huge challenge to those skilled with Linux and firewalls, but to many Pi users it’s a closed book. So the Pi folks have come up with a painless way to connect to your Pi wherever it is, and it’s called Raspberry Pi Connect.

To use the service all you need is a Pi running the latest 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS, so sadly that excludes base model Zeros and older models. Sign in to the Raspberry Pi Connect server, follow the instructions, and you’re on your way. Under the hood it’s the well-known VNC protocol at work, with the connection setup being managed via WebRTC. The Pi servers are intended to act simply as connection facilitators for peer-to-peer traffic, though they are capable of handling through traffic themselves. It’s a beta service with a single server in the UK at the time of writing, though we’d expect both the number of servers and the offering to evolve over time.

We think this is a useful addition to the Pi offering, and we expect to see it used in all manner of inventive ways. Meanwhile it’s a while since we had a look at connecting to a headless Pi, but much of the information is still relevant.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 772: Raspberry Pi From The Man Himself

February 28, 2024 by 15 Comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Elliot Williams talk with Eben Upton about the Raspberry Pi! The conversation covers the new Pi 5, the upcoming CM5, the possible Pi500, and the Initial Public Offering (IPO) that may happen before too long. There’s also the PCIe port, the RP1, and the unexpected effects of using Broadcom chips. And then we ask the Billion Dollar question: What’s the money from an IPO going to fund? New hardware, software upgrades, better documentation? Nope, and the answer surprised us, too.

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 772: Raspberry Pi From The Man Himself” →

Will There Be Any Pi Left For Us?

February 2, 2024 by 72 Comments

Our world has been abuzz with the news that Raspberry Pi are to float on the London Stock Exchange. It seems an obvious move for a successful and ambitious company, and as they seem to be in transition from a maker of small computers into a maker of chips which happen to also go on their small computers, they will no doubt be using the float to generate the required investment to complete that process.

New Silicon Needs Lots Of Cash

An RP1 chip on a Raspberry Pi 5.
The most important product Raspberry Pi have ever made.

When a tech startup with immense goodwill grows in this way, there’s always a worry that it could mark the start of the decline. You might for instance be concerned that a floated Raspberry Pi could bring in financial whiz-kids who let the hobbyist products wither on the vine as they license the brand here and there and perform all sorts of financial trickery in search of shareholder value and not much else. Fortunately we don’t think that this will be the case, and Eben Upton has gone to great lengths to reassure the world that his diminutive computers are safe. That is however not to say that there might be pitfalls ahead from a hobbyist Pi customer perspective, so it’s worth examining what this could mean.

As we remarked last year, the move into silicon is probably the most important part of the Pi strategy for the 2020s. The RP2040 microcontroller was the right chip with the right inventory to do well from the pandemic shortages, and on the SBCs the RP1 all-in-one peripheral gives them independence from a CPU house such as Broadcom. It’s not a difficult prediction that they will proceed further into silicon, and it wouldn’t surprise us to see a future RP chip containing a fully-fledged SoC and GPU. Compared to their many competitors who rely on phone and tablet SoCs, this would give the Pi boards a crucial edge in terms of supply chain, and control over the software.

Continue reading “Will There Be Any Pi Left For Us?” →

Displays We Love Hacking: Parallel RGB

January 25, 2024 by 8 Comments

You might have seen old display panels, from 3″ to 10″, with 40-pin FFC connectors where every pin seems to be used for some data signal. We call these displays parallel RGB, or TTL RGB, or DPI, and you can find them in higher-power MCU, Raspberry Pi, and other Linux SBC projects. You deserve to know what to do with those – let’s take a look.

The idea is simple – this interface requires you to constantly send a stream of pixels to the display, and you need to send those pixels through a parallel bus. You can send up to 8 bits per color channel per pixel, which makes for 24 bits, and the 24-bit mode is indeed the standard, but in practice, many parallel RGB implementations don’t bother with more than 5-6 bits of color – two common kinds of parallel RGB links are RGB565 and RGB666. The parallel RGB interface is a very straightforward approach to sending pixels to your display, and in many cases, you can also convert parallel RGB to LVDS or VGA interfaces relatively easily!

If you’re new to it, the easiest way you can drive a parallel RGB display is from a Raspberry Pi, where the parallel RGB interface is known as DPI. This is how 800 x 480 display Pi HATs like the Pimoroni HyperPixel work – they use up almost all of the GPIOs on your Pi, but you get a reasonably high-resolution display with a low power footprint, and you don’t need any intermediate ICs either. FPGAs and some higher-grade MCUs also often have parallel RGB output capability, and surely, someone could even use the RP2040 PIO as well!

Throughout the last decade, parallel RGB has been used less and less, but you will still encounter it – maybe you’re working with an old game console like the PSP and would like to put new guts into it, maybe you’re playing with some tasty display that uses parallel RGB, or maybe you’d like to convert parallel RGB into something else while treating it with respect! Let’s go through what makes parallel RGB tick, what tools you have got to work with it, and a few tips and tricks. Continue reading “Displays We Love Hacking: Parallel RGB” →

2023: As The Hardware World Turns

January 2, 2024 by 18 Comments

We’ve made it through another trip around the sun, and for the first time in what feels like far too long, it seems like things went pretty well for the hackers and makers of the world. Like so many, our community suffered through a rough couple of years: from the part shortages that made building even the simplest of devices more expensive and difficult than it should have been, to the COVID-mandated social distancing that robbed us of our favorite meetups. But when looking back on the last twelve months, most of the news was refreshingly positive.

Pepperoni costs ten bucks, but they can’t activate Windows on their registers…

Oh sure, a trip to to the grocery store can lead to a minor existential crisis at the register, but there’s not much we at Hackaday can do about that other than recommend you some good hydroponics projects to help get your own home farm up and running.

As has become our New Year tradition, we like to take this time to go over some of the biggest stories and trends that we picked up on from our unique vantage point. Some will be obvious, but there’s always a few that sneak up on us. These posts tend to make for interesting reading in the future, and if you’ve got the time, we’d recommend going back and reading the previous entries in this series and reminiscing a bit.

It’s also a good time to reflect on Hackaday itself — how we’ve grown, the things that have changed, and perhaps what we can do better going forward. Believe it or not we do read all of the feedback from the community, whether it’s in the comments of individual posts or sent into us directly. We couldn’t do this without readers like you, so please drop us a line and let us know what you’re thinking.

So before we get any farther into 2024, let’s wind back the clock and revisit some of the highlights from the previous year.

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Can Google’s New AI Read Your Datasheets For You?

December 12, 2023 by 25 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of AI tools lately, and, of course, we know they aren’t really smart, but they sure fool people into thinking they are actually intelligent. Of course, these programs can only pick through their training, and a lot depends on what they are trained on. When you use something like ChatGPT, for example, you assume they trained it on reasonable data. Sure, it might get things wrong anyway, but there’s also the danger that it simply doesn’t know what you are talking about. It would be like calling your company’s help desk and asking where you left your socks — they simply don’t know.

We’ve seen attempts to have AI “read” web pages or documents of your choice and then be able to answer questions about them. The latest is from Google with NotebookLM. It integrates a workspace where you can make notes, ask questions, and provide sources. The sources can be text snippets, documents from Google Drive, or PDF files you upload.

You can’t ask questions until you upload something, and we presume the AI restricts its answers to what’s in the documents you provide. It still won’t be perfect, but at least it won’t just give you bad information from an unknown source. Continue reading “Can Google’s New AI Read Your Datasheets For You?” →