Raspberry Pi orders top 350,000 with shipments promised from May

More than a third of a million orders have been placed for the much-vaunted Raspberry Pi, the credit card-sized computers that cost less than £22.

Distributer Element14, part of the Premier Farnell group, has said it received around 100,000 orders for the device, and promised to get them delivered from July onwards.

“We appreciate customers are desperate to get their hands on a Raspberry Pi and want to reassure them that we are working on this as quickly as we can,” said Mike Buffham, product director at Element14.

Meanwhile, RS Components, the other Raspberry Pi distributor, confirmed it had received orders in excess of 250,000.

Demand for the devices has already seen the first batch snaffled up and Element14 said it expected the second batch to arrive at some point in early May.

The Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of Eben Upton, a Cambridge University lecturer and his colleagues that grew tired of seeing prospective graduates lack basic programming skills.

They came up with the idea of producing a small, cheap computer that could be widely used in schools and encourage schoolchildren to learn the art of programming.

The Raspberry Pi is comparable in specification to a decent smartphone, with a 700MHz processor and a GPU capable of displaying full 1080p video via a HDMI output and runs a version of Fedora Linux that boots from an SD Card Flash drive.