10k Raspberry Pi Units Available In December

An anonymous reader writes "A tweet appeared from Raspberry Pi stating the launch of the $25 PC wasn't happening in November as expected. So I decided to investigate further and contacted Raspberry Pi to see what was going on. Eben Upton was kind enough to email me back and give us some good and bad news. The bad news is: we aren't getting the $25 PC this month as expected. But that's where the bad news ends, as it is still arriving in 2011 for some people. Eben confirmed that an order has been placed for 10,000 units, but they won't arrive until the end of November. That means we will see Raspberry Pi go up for sale in December, but it won't be a typical 'get as many out the door as you can' launch. Those first 10k are earmarked for programmers as software is desperately required before a full consumer launch." Update: Apparently some of the details about the production of units and who can get one from the first batch have changed. Raspberry Pi has updated their front page with the latest information.

Comments

Re:Obligatory question

[tacktick]

Here is the quick and dirty from their website:

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.

We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.

Our first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a fully-configured system.

Provisional specification

        700MHz ARM11
        128MB or 256MB of SDRAM
        OpenGL ES 2.0
        1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
        Composite and HDMI video output
        USB 2.0
        SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
        General-purpose I/O
        Optional integrated 2-port USB hub and 10/100 Ethernet controller
        Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)

Clarification

[ebenupton]

I'd encourage people to visit www.raspberrypi.org to read the clarification we've posted. Summary

- we're in the process of accumulating parts kits for the first 10k unit production run
- we'll be doing a phased launch, to avoid the risk of kicking out 10k units and having them come straight back with a trivial early-life bug
- the majority of devices will be available on a first-come first-served basis, with a small number held back for continuity of supply to key partners

Eben Upton
Raspberry Pi Foundation

Re:_NOT_ the end of Arduino?

[ebenupton]

I'd agree with this. Although we provide a bit of GPIO, we're aiming for a rather different market from Arduino. In particular, we consume much more power, don't have the ADC and PWM facilities that Arduino offers, and only do 3v3 I/O. Of course, I'd like to see the Arduino *tools* running on the Raspberry Pi.

Eben

Re:Delays

[ebenupton]

You know how it is. Haters gonna hate :)

In all seriousness, we haven't taken anyone's money, and have spent a lot of our own time and money on this. We've been very open with people about the challenges we face in getting something like this done, and will continue to be open in the run up to and aftermath of launch. We're big boys, and can handle the hate.

Eben Upton
Raspberry Pi Foundation

Re:I want more than an arduino(s)

[Andy Dodd]

A little more info, more along the lines of why there is so much generic Broadcom hate and distrust within the Linux community:

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 - If you go down about 3/4 of the page, you'll see that:
Until 9/9/2010, the only drivers for ANY broadcom device were created via reverse engineering. Broadcom provided ZERO support to the b43 developers, and I'm fairly certain they still don't have any proper technical documentation. (Sorry Broadcom, but source code isn't documentation.)
After 9/9/2010 - only THREE chipsets (out of quite many) had any sort of "official" open source driver support for Linux from Broadcom.

Meanwhile, chipsets from other manufacturers (Intel, Atheros, Intersil/Harris, Ralink) have had robust open source support for a VERY long time. For many years, Broadcom WLAN chipsets were completely useless in Linux due to Broadcom's refusal to provide any documentation.