FORGET THE shiny new iPad, the Raspberry Pi might be the smallest and cheapest computer ever to cause a revolution.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer priced at $25 (€33 for the European market).

This minuscule unit was designed by a group of Cambridge computer scientists as an affordable solution to encourage school children to begin coding.

“Ten more years and I would say we’re doomed,” says Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, commenting on the dearth of programming skills amongst pre-university kids.

“There’s still time. If we jump on this in the next year or two and children start programming at 11 or 12 years old there will be a new generation of graduates emerging by 2020. We’ll have the first Raspberry Pi trained people.”

So what makes the Raspberry Pi so special and how does it manage to keep production costs so low? It is a fully functioning computer, albeit one with all the fat trimmed away. It comes as a bare bones unit minus a screen, mouse, keyboard or even case to house it in. But the beauty of this is that it is designed to work with spare bits you may have lying around the house.

“You can use an old television as the display, any USB mouse or keyboard will work with it and a USB mobile phone charger will work as a power supply. For storage a SD card will suffice,” explains Upton.

Essentially, these are things you can “beg, borrow or steal”, he adds.

It comes in two versions: model A is the $25 one with no network card, and model B, at $35, which has an Ethernet port. “We were surprised at how many people were interested in model A: about 20-30 per cent. It consumes less power and is perfect for robotics and simple non-connected uses.”

The real attraction of the Raspberry Pi is both in the flexibility of its operating system and what it can be used for. There is support for various “flavours” of the Linux operating system (no Windows in sight) but the Fedora OS in particular has been optimised and comes ready to download bundled with various applications including a word processor, image editor and the Firefox web browser.

More importantly, it comes with four programming languages that users can get started with: Python, Perl, Ruby and Bash.

Potentially low-cost computing efforts like this can raise the number of students opting for Leaving Certificate technology beyond the meagre 839 who took the subject last year. (In comparison 12,400 took home economics).

Upton is confident in the ability of the average youngster to use these programming languages: “I recently worked with school children who programmed their own simple version of Snake . I was expecting that they would need spoon-feeding but when I showed them the finished game they immediately began hacking it to change the colour and behaviour of the snake”

You can learn by building from first principles, he explains. By changing this and that in the code to see what happens, children begin to understand the power of programming.

This is a mission for Upton and his colleagues at the Raspberry Pi Foundation because he thinks the current view of digital natives as tech savvy youngsters is misleading.

“In the UK what blinded previous governments was the attitude that if kids know how to programme the VCR they must be technologically literate,” says Upton in exasperation. “Children can problem solve but if this is only applied to playing Farmville all they will learn is how to play Farmville really well.”

While the Raspberry Pi started out as part of a crusade for technological literacy amongst school goers its popularity has exploded within the hobbyist and hacker communities.

“There was a relatively small number available so we kind of expected it to sell out but we didn’t expect 10,000 back orders,” says Upton in disbelief.

A device this small and cheap makes for more than a no-frills PC replacement. It can be used in robotics projects, can serve as a home media centre (due to its HDMI connection) or can even be used as an inexpensive replacement for custom digital signage.

Gerry Kavanagh is a programmer, open source advocate and member of Galway-based community craft space 091 Labs.

He has already ordered his Raspberry Pi and extols its virtues by comparing it to the BBC Micro, a hugely popular computer from the 1980s that inspired a generation of programmers like himself who are now in there 30s and 40s.

David Braben, one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is also the creator of Elite, one of the most groundbreaking games of the 1980s. “The BBC Micro wasn’t very powerful but with this space trading game it managed to contain a universe. Anything Braben is involved in has to be pretty cool,” says Kavanagh.

Through 091 Labs Kavanagh and other creative and tech-minded people get together to hack, redesign, modify and build new things.

The Raspberry Pi will no doubt be welcomed as Kavanagh explains how he plans to use it in a project he’s working on to combine VoIP technology with high frequency (HF) radio.

He sees this low-cost computer as an entry point into computing for “people who aren’t necessarily engineers” but says that as with similar devices it’s difficult to see what applications it will have when first launched.

Kavanagh predicts that the Raspberry Pi will be used in home automation, media centres and similar in the near future as the developer community begins to make available specific distributions of Linus that will tackle certain tasks.

“This could possibly even be bundled with specific hardware and the software comes on a memory card with the customisations done for you.”

This mix of community driven software and hardware solutions coupled with a bit of DIY on the part of the end user could change our attitude towards technology as a black box. Raspberry Pi might be the device that connects the idea of hand-crafted and custom-built technology to the general public.

“We, as consumers of technology, have become mere appliance operators but there is great power in making our own toys,” Kavanagh says.