Raspberry Pi Production Begins

Raspberry Pi production began in January 2012 at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, Wales, with the first batch of Model B boards going through SMT (surface-mount technology) assembly and automated optical inspection before shipment to distributors RS Components and Farnell/Element14. The Raspberry Pi Foundation had spent 2011 refining the design to hit the $35 price point: an early prototype used an Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller, but the decision shifted to the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (a multimedia processor Broadcom designed for IPTV set-top boxes and mobile phones) after Eben Upton, working at Broadcom, arranged access to the chip at educational pricing. The BCM2835 integrated a 700 MHz ARM1176JZF-S core (ARM11 architecture, ARMv6 ISA), a VideoCore IV GPU (supporting 1080p30 H.264 hardware decode, OpenGL ES 2.0, and OpenVG), and 256 MB of LPDDR2 RAM in a package-on-package stack above the SoC — a single component rather than separate CPU, GPU, and memory chips. The GPU’s hardware H.264 decoder was critical for education use cases like media centers (XBMC ran acceptably on the Pi using GPU-accelerated video) and for making a $35 device feel useful.

The board design reflected strict cost discipline: no case (user provides their own enclosure or uses bare board), no storage (SD card socket only — no onboard flash), no power supply (5V micro-USB, same as Android phone chargers), no keyboard or display (HDMI output, RCA composite video jack, and 3.5mm audio output only). The 26-pin GPIO header was deliberately included as the interface for electronics projects — digital I/O pins, I2C bus (for sensors and displays), SPI bus (for external ADCs and displays), and a UART (for serial communication with microcontrollers and GPS modules). The Model B cost $35 and included two USB 2.0 ports and a 100 Mbps Ethernet port; the simpler Model A cost $25 with one USB port and no Ethernet. The first OS image was a Debian 6 “squeeze” port for ARMv6 hard-float (using the VFPv2 floating-point unit), distributed as a downloadable disk image for users to write to a 4+ GB SD card. Raspbian, a Debian rebuild compiled specifically for the Pi’s ARMv6 FPU with armhf ABI, launched in July 2012 and became the primary recommended OS because it ran significantly faster than the generic ARM soft-float Debian build.

Production capacity in January 2012 was approximately 10,000–20,000 units for the initial batch — far short of the 700,000+ pre-registrations collected before launch. The Foundation had chosen to work through RS and Farnell rather than sell directly, trading margin for the distributors’ manufacturing supply chain relationships, fulfillment infrastructure, and export compliance capabilities. This meant the boards could ship to hobbyists and schools worldwide from the first day without the Foundation managing its own logistics. The decision to manufacture in the UK (Sony Pencoed) added cost versus Asian contract manufacturers but gave the Foundation supply chain visibility and alignment with the education-oriented mission. By the time of the February 29, 2012 public sale launch, all 10,000 units in the first batch had already been allocated; new orders placed on February 29 went into a queue fulfilled over subsequent weeks as production ramped. The Pi’s open hardware schematics and the Foundation’s educational documentation (Python tutorials, GPIO guides, project books) were freely available, establishing the combination of cheap hardware and open documentation that became the template for the maker hardware movement.