Electronic Products & Technology

Allied serves up Raspberry Pi to robotics competition

EP&T Magazine   

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Allied Electronics, Fort Worth TX, will provide a Model A Raspberry Pi computer board to each one of the more than 130 high school-age Dean’s List Award finalists who participated in the 2014 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) season. The Dean’s List Award began in 2010 to recognize the leadership and dedication of the most outstanding FRC students.

More than 130 Dean’s List Award finalists were recognized during a ceremony at the 2014 FIRST Championship event, held recently in St. Louis MO, which involved more than 10,000 participants and 30,000 spectators.

“We’re thrilled to support FIRST in their efforts to engage tomorrow’s inventors and engineers in the exciting world of technology,” says Elisa Weber, Allied’s director of brand strategy. “The Dean’s List Award finalists are going to be the innovators who will take us into the future, and we’re proud to be right there with them.”

Founded by noted inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, the mission of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology)is to, “… inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering, and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.”

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“We are pleased that Allied Electronics is helping us celebrate the achievements of these young people, and our Dean’s List Award finalists will certainly appreciate their generous gift,” says Frank Merrick, FRC director.

Intended to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools, Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized single-board computer that plugs into a TV and can perform many of the functions of a desktop PC. With 256MB RAM and a variety of input sockets, the device runs on the Linux operating system. Launched in February 2012, it was announced that two million units had been shipped by the end of October 2013.

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