Push to satisfy youngsters who cannot wait for life of Pi The UK manufacturing sector can thank the impatience of tech-savvy youngsters for the return of Raspberry Pi production to British shores, writes Mark Wembridge. Since the $35 minicomputer was launched in early 2012, demand for the credit-card sized devices has outstripped supply, leading to a hefty backlog of orders that both the major distributors of the Raspberry Pi - Electrocomponents and Premier Farnell - were eager to erase. This was exacerbated by a six-week delivery time from its manufacturing base in China, which led Premier Farnell's Element14 brand and rival Electrocomponents to implement a one-per-customer limit on their sale. It was such problems that prompted the recent decision by Element14 to move all of its production to Sony's factory in the Welsh town of Pencoed, cutting the UK delivery time. The computer, which is based on an Arm microprocessor, had previously been produced in several global locations, including two plants in China. The Raspberry Pi was created by Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge's computer laboratory, in an attempt to staunch the decline in computer skills among A-level students. Rights over the computers are owned by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and more than 1m of the devices have been sold to date. The device plugs into a television and a keyboard, and its range has expanded to include an array of accessories such as USB power adaptors, keyboard and mouse sets, memory cards, and even a wireless dongle dubbed a "wi-pi."