I ❤️ Raspberry Pi
“Doing sensible things is good. Inciting many other people to do sensible things is better” – Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi. Here are just 3 examples of that ethos in action last week.
[Disclosure: I am a board member and de minimis investor at Raspberry Pi, the UK publicly listed manufacturer of single board computers and industrial micro-controllers.
Last year Raspberry Pi shipped their 70 millionth low cost computer, making them the 3rd most populous general purpose computing architecture behind Intel X86 and Apple. OK, it’s a very distant third, reflecting the dominance of the Intel and Apple architectures, but nonetheless this is an extraordinary achievement for a company whose original ambitions were limited to 10,000 units.
The popularity of the Pi comes not just from it’s low cost, starting at £35, but from it’s incredible flexibility, openness and industrial grade documentation. With V2 of its AI co-processor released a couple of weeks ago, it can now run the latest generation of edge computing small language models. That means conversational voice agents can do useful tasks without an internet connection.
I had 3 separate reasons to feel especially privileged to be associated with Raspberry Pi last week.
- On Jan 17th, along with Entrepreneurs First and Raspberry Pi I hosted a hackathon (i.e. an intense quick and dirty coding competition) for around 40 very smart young AI engineers, many of them still at university, prototyping point solutions for diverse assistive needs. The creativity and enthusiasm of the participants was only surpassed by the fiendish difficulty of delivering real value assistive solutions to what sound like easy problems (Where’s my water bottle? How do I operate this coffee machine? Is what I’m saying making my colleague look happy or sad?). Raspberry Pi very generously loaned us 20 fully configured flagship Pi 5 computers with cameras, AI co-processors, keyboards and monitors.
Huge thanks also to the other event sponsors (Eleven Labs, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services). In particular several members of the Meta Smart Glasses product team attended, and Christopher Patnoe, Google’s European head of accessibility, delivered a short inspirational talk on inclusivity by design.
For many participants the hackathon was a great introduction to using bare bones hardware and interfacing with the physical world; two fundamental tenets of Raspberry Pi’s early raison d'être.
Looking ahead, I am minded to run a slightly more structured 2 day assistive tech hackathon next year. It’ll be interesting to see how far AI models have advanced in the intervening 12 months. - Entirely coincidentally, on Jan 20th, I was contacted about speech challenged members of African communities where there is no high bandwidth internet or mobile phone connectivity. The Centre For Digital Language Inclusion is prototyping miniature LLMs and speech models running standalone on the latest Raspberry Pi. This could be life changing for users who otherwise really struggle to communicate effectively with their families, colleagues and neighbours.
- That same day I posted 'I am not a robot': Wilfully and pointlessly inaccessible by design, laying out the unnecessary barriers to accessibility caused by traditional web site captcha protections against scammy bots scraping content or creating fake accounts. Within 48 hours, Raspberry Pi had updated their own website simplifying the newsletter subscription flow for all users, and hallelujah, it took me less than 5 seconds to sign up. Amazing.
In a similar vein, if your organisation’s website uses traditional captchas then please do consider the much more seamless Cloudflare Turnstile. It’s great for accessibility and great for all users. More broadly I’d love to engage with anyone with direct or indirect influence over the accessibility of any product (digital or physical), and of course if you’re interested in sponsoring or attending next year’s hackathon, please do reach out’