The Raspberry Pi has already sold over 3.8 million units

The Raspberry Pi was never expected to be a massive volume seller. It was supposed to be a teaching and educational tool to help get kids and others interested in development and Maker culture.

But, the popularity of the Raspberry Pi seems to be unrivaled–and, although unexpected, extremely welcome. The developers of the Pi have announced in a tweet announced that the $35 minicomputer has already sold over 3.8 million units. At launch, the creators of Raspberry Pi is expected to produce about 10,000 units in the entire life cycle of the product.

Launched in late February 2012, the UK based Raspberry educational charity quickly attracted a large audience. The million Raspberry Pi has been achieved in less than one year, and two million in less than two years. The phenomenon has, however, recently accelerated. Thus, over the last 11 months, over 1.8 million Raspberry Pi were sold.

Raspberry Pi has represented for many users approach more palatable on the front of the mini PC, especially for the extremely aggressive price and for its versatility. It signs the renewal of computer usage when it needed more. By adapting to new markets, such as embedded electronics and robotics, Pi goes beyond a simple machine for geek used for educational projects. Since then it has become the basis of numerous projects by amateurs and experts alike using as a platform for innovation, prototyping, and experimentation.

Since mid-July 2014, the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi available in an improved version. The Raspberry Pi B+ is characterized by four USB 2.0 ports, a microSD card slot and a reduced power consumption. In early 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Raspberry Pi Compute Module for industrial needs that can interoperate with all the millions of modules that the standard Pi has received.

Encouraged by the successful sale of Raspberry Pi, different manufacturers are resurrecting these Mini-PCs. The Chinese education initiative Lemaker.org has announced an improved version of their Raspberry Pi clone Banana Pi. Banana Pi applies to a wide range of fields including low-cost computer for education purpose, multimedia applications, scratch, arduino，game emulator，home server, and robot and so on.  And it has others including HummingBoard and Intel’s Galileo, both with more powerful hardware plus a kit to assemble called Kano.