The awesome Raspberry Pi mini PC has just celebrated its second birthday and to celebrate the Raspberry Pi Foundation creators of the mini computer system have announced the development of Raspberry Pi open source graphics drivers with the help of Broadcom.
On the 29th of February 2012 the Raspberry Pi mini PC was first launched by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for $35 or £25 and sold 100,000 units on the first day has now clocked up over 2.5 million sales since its launch. If you are interested in learning more about how you can add a graphics card and increase the power of your Pi mini PC, check out the currently supported Raspberry Pi GPU hardware.
The Raspberry Pi was created to provide an affordable computer for educational purposes to enabled both young and old to take up programming. Eben Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced on the Raspberry Pi Blog over the weekend that :
“Broadcom announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license. The source release targets the BCM21553 cellphone chip, but it should be reasonably straightforward to port this to the BCM2835, allowing access to the graphics core without using the blob.”
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has also started a competition as an incentive to complete the work required to make the drivers fully functional and will pay a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to demonstrate satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using the new open source drivers.
For more information on the new Raspberry Pi open source graphics drivers and details on how to enter the $10,000 competition jump over to the for full details. Read out essential guide if you are interested in Raspberry Pi displays and HATS.
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