I can hardly believe it when I heard about this story … yes, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that they’ve produced their millionth Raspberry Pi computer. And it’s ALL made in Pencoed in South Wales, a little town where I grew up!
“The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that a million of the tiny cheap computers aimed at transforming education have now been made in the UK.
When the Pi was launched in February last year, the device was made in China. But a few months on, production was brought home to Sony’s Pencoed factory in South Wales.
When I visited on Monday, Gareth Jones, whose job it is to win new business for the factory, told me he got in touch with the Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton after seeing the BBC’s coverage of the launch.
At first neither he nor Upton thought it would be possible to make the sums add up and produce the Pi at a price to compete with China. But then they thought about the cost of delivering from China, of having someone based there to oversee manufacturing and the quality control issues the project was already encountering. With some investment by Sony in machinery which automated a key part of the process, they decided it could work – and within a couple of months Pi production was up and running.
Since then, they’ve been churning out as many as 12,000 a day, and showing that manufacturing can still work in the UK. The Pi has been exported around the world and looks set to become the best-selling British computer since the 1980s – though as it retails at about £30, it will never earn the revenues that the likes of the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro achieved.”
Source: BBC
