Apple’s recently released iPad was built to target the education market, and if things go according to plan for Shenzhen-based start-up SunFounder, students will soon have another tablet that is education-focused. These two won’t overlap, since Apple’s product, in true Apple fashion, is meant for the masses — it’s a cake to pick up, easy to master and makes learning basic skills such as reading or sciences relatable for all. SunFounder’s tablet won’t be nearly as easy to pick up, because it’ll run Raspberry Pi, the single-board computers developed to teach students how to program and code.
Named the RasPad, the tablet is currently available for pre-order now after a successful Kickstarter campaign that saw the company raise nearly $611,000 (four bucks short of that mark, to be exact) in just a couple of months.
Even though the company’s creative heads, CEO Mike Wong, sales director Super Wong (no relation), and development lead Cavon Lee all consider themselves “Makers” — a subculture of DIY tech enthusiasts — they were surprised at the reception of the device they created.
“I studied electrical engineering and went to work immediately at a chipset company after graduation,” says Mike Wong. “But I’ve always thought that the stuff I was into were niche, but now we know that the niche is growing. Tech is cool, and more and more people want to be a maker.”
The RasPad is built for just that. It is a mostly standard looking tablet (though significantly thicker) with a 10.1-inch display and stereo speakers and, of course, a modular motherboard with all the required Raspberry Pi ports possible, so anyone can plug in a breadboard or tinker board and program things on the fly.
For newbies, development lead Lee built a simple graphical user interface that is heavy no visuals and drag-and-drop system for beginners to learn programming. There are also no shortage of DIY kits already out there. The company has more than a dozen instruction booklets to teach users too.
Mike Wong says the RasPad was made to cater to everyone from beginners to more advanced hackers, so in addition to the ability to run Arduino hardware, users can fit in a 40-pin Raspberry Pi ribbon too.
Mike Wong started SunFounder in 2013, initially as a company that built drones and instructions for open-source coding, but going forward, the company will focus on promoting Rasperry Pi and empowering makers. Now that the RasPad is reality, the company of about 30 are hard at work at building “the world’s first Raspberry Pi app that focuses on visual programming to allow beginners to code.”
The tablet is far from a fully formed product right now, but that’s perfect for the DIY spirit of makers. With a dedicated Raspberry Pi community, they can build for the RasPad as they see fit.
Mike Wong adds: “We are an open source company, we are all about exploring and learning, and making.”
