Also known as: Eben Upton
Eben Upton (born 1978) is a British engineer who created the Raspberry Pi and co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation, aiming to give students an affordable, hackable computer.1
Life and work
Concerned that applicants to study computing arrived with less hands-on experience than earlier generations, Upton set out to build a cheap, approachable machine for learning to program. Working with colleagues and drawing on his chip background at Broadcom, he led the design of the first Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized single-board computer launched in 2012.1 It sold far beyond the educational market, becoming one of the best-selling computers ever and a staple of the maker and embedded-electronics world.1
Why they matter
The Raspberry Pi made a complete Linux computer with GPIO pins available for the price of a textbook, putting real computing into classrooms, hobby projects, and field deployments. It is a natural host for SDR work: a Pi by the antenna can run a capture node, feeding samples to a decoder like GopherTrunk. Upton continues as a leader of Raspberry Pi’s commercial and foundation arms.1
Legacy
Tens of millions of Raspberry Pi boards have shipped, and the platform reshaped how people learn hardware, prototype devices, and build low-cost embedded systems.
Sources
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Eben Upton — Wikipedia, for biography and the Raspberry Pi. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4