When you sell a tiny $35 circuit board capable of booting directly into a streamlined version of Linux, you expect a certain level of success. In the case of Raspberry Pi, that success has come in the form of one million sales.
The team at element 14/Premier Farnell announced on Saturday that they have managed to sell more than half a million Rapsberry Pis. Element 14 is one of two official distributors for the Raspberry Pi. While figures for RS Components have not yet been revealed, it is believed that it has also sold at least 500,000 Raspberry Pi units.
To celebrate its impressive achievement, the Pi team has released an infographic with some interesting facts about the device’s production scale. For example, if stacked one on top of another, the Pis already sold would stack as high as 111 Empire State Buildings.
The Raspberry Pi has been so successful that 4,000 devices are now leaving its UK factory every single day, a total of 7.5 Pis per second.
The success of the devices have led to plenty of mod friendly demonstrations including a new mini arcade cabinet, a DIY GSM base station, and more.
If you are unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi, here is a great description from the manufacturers website:
“The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.”
While the devices have practical real world capabilities, they are also being used as a cheap alternative for teaching children about computer hardware.
