Raspberry Pi

On the software side, we’ve done enormous amounts of work to reduce the idle and loaded power consumption of the device, passed OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance, started work on a Vulkan driver, and shipped PXE network boot mode and a prototype of USB mass storage boot mode – all this alongside the usual round of bug fixes, feature additions, and kernel version bumps. The BCM2711 chip that we use on Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, so the real barrier to our offering a larger-memory variant was the lack of an 8GB LPDDR4 package. To supply the slightly higher peak currents required by the new memory package, James has shuffled the power supply components on the board, removing a switch-mode power supply from the right-hand side of the board next to the USB 2.0 sockets and adding a new switcher next to the USB-C power connnector. As our community grows, we want to make sure it’s as easy as possible for new users to find our recommended operating system for Raspberry Pi.

The team visited Liverpool Central Library to find out what the children at their Code Club think about the club and its activities, and what they’re taking away from attending. We visited Liverpool Central Library to find out what the children at their Code Club think about their coding club. After he’d done a couple of terms he told us, ‘Tuesday is my favourite day now because I get to come to Code Club: it makes my brain feel sparkly.’ He’s now writing his own adventure game in Scratch! Here is their wonderful Scratch advert: Code Club is a nationwide network of volunteer-led after-school coding clubs for children.

We ended the year with over 11 million Raspberry Pi computers sold, millions of people using our learning resources, almost 1,000 Certified Educators in the UK and US, 75,000 children regularly attending over 5,000 Code Clubs in the UK, hundreds of Raspberry Jams taking place all over the world, code written by schoolkids running in space (yes, space), and much, much more. As I’ve said before, what we achieve is only possible thanks to the amazing community of makers, educators, volunteers, and young people all over the world who share our mission and support our work. It’s already one of the largest networks of after-school clubs in the world, and this year we’ll be working with our existing partners in Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Ukraine, as well as finding more partners in more countries, to bring Code Club to many more children. One of the most important things we do at Pi Towers is create the free educational resources that are used in Code Clubs, STEM clubs, CoderDojos, classrooms, libraries, makerspaces, and bedrooms by people of all ages learning about computing and digital making.