FOREWORD

When we founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2008 and set out to develop the Raspberry Pi computer, we saw it primarily as a platform for software development. If you had asked me then what our predominant educational use case would be in 2018, I would probably have cited game development: after all, that had been my route into computing back in the late 1980s.

In the six years since we launched the first Raspberry Pi, the community around our little educational computer has grown beyond our wildest dreams. We’ve seen children and adults all over the world using Raspberry Pi to learn engineering skills; we’ve sent two units to the International Space Station, where they have run code developed by over 3,000 teams of young people from across Europe; and we’ve trained thousands of educators to deliver compelling lessons using our library of free educational resources.

All this has been a surprise, but the biggest surprise for me has been the popularity of physical computing projects: not just writing code, but using it to sense, control, and interact with the real world. While moving sprites around on the screen is cool, moving physical objects around the room is cooler. The 40-pin GPIO connector, included at my colleague Pete Lomas’s insistence, has proven in many ways to be the single most useful feature on the board.

It’s a truism that platforms are only as good as their documentation, and for many beginners, the learning curve for physical computing can appear daunting. Learn Robotics with Raspberry Pi provides a gentle introduction to this exciting field, building up from the simplest input and output examples to a robot which incorporates wireless control and is capable of autonomously tracking and following lines and objects.

My hope is that in twenty or thirty years, a handful of people will look back on Raspberry Pi with the same affection I have for the BBC Micro and Commodore Amiga. If that happens, I’m sure some of those people will have Learn Robotics with Raspberry Pi to thank for showing them how to get the most out of the platform.

Dr. Eben Upton, CBE FREng

CEO, Raspberry Pi (Trading), Ltd.

Cambridge, UK

April 2018