Raspberry Pi rockets to 2 million sales, beats own expectations

The Raspberry Pi Foundation's plan is ahead of schedule, it seems, with everybody and their dog wanting a tasty slice of affordable coding goodness.

The maker of the diminutive £24 (around $35, or AU$37) computer had set its sights on shifting 2 million Raspberry Pis by the end of February 2014, two years since the first version went on sale.

Liz Upton, who handles communications for the charity, has revealed in a blog post that the goal was smashed by the end of October 2013, one year after the millionth Pi was sold.

She wrote: "It took us almost exactly a year to sell the first million Raspberry Pis. going on that basis, we calculated that we might, if we were lucky, reach the second million around January 2014, or slightly afterwards - we were confident we'd get there by the end of February 2014.

"So it was a bit of a shock at the end of last week when we got the latest sales figures and discovered that the 2,000,000th Raspberry Pi was sold in the last week of October."

Bake it yourself

Originally designed to help people learn computer programming, it's become a smash hit among DIY tech hobbyists, with owners having created anything from monitors to electrical engineering tools.

It's also seen a number of official accessories made for it, including an infra-red camera used for shooting photos or videos in low light conditions. Two versions of the Pi can be bought online: the introductory Type A single computer with 256MB RAM (£24 - around $35, or AU$37) and the Type B board, which is designed for Internet use and comes with 512MB RAM (£31.20 - around $50, or AU$33).

The first 2000 Raspberry Pis were manufactured in China before production was moved to Wales in September 2012.

• Why is the Raspberry Pi going back to school?