Raspberry Pi challenge to get creative juices flowing

7 Mar 2012

The Raspberry Pi €25 microcomputer that sold at the rate of 7,000 an hour last week has inspired a new innovation challenge called the Raspberry RoadTest.

Collaborative community and electronics store element14 has put together an innovation challenge based on the credit-card sized computer.

The global Raspberry RoadTest challenge poses the question, “What innovation will you create using the amazing Raspberry Pi computer?”

The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is aimed at stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools.

The device is based on a Broadcom system on a chip (SoC) processor which includes 256MB of RAM, a VideoCore GPU and an ARM 700MHz GPU. It runs on a Linux operating system.

According to element14, there have been 30,000 downloads of the operating system – more than 30 terabytes worth of file transfers – from its website.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com