Raspberry Pi Has Gone To Manufacturing

alecclews writes "After weeks of waiting, the Raspberry Pi foundation, who are creating a $25 computer to bootstrap computing education, has flipped the switch on manufacturing. They had wanted to build the board in the UK but it turns out to be uneconomic."

Comments

Not vapourware!

[isCreeper($('Ssss'))]

After all of the accusations of vapourware, it's nice that they're actually making these.

Re:Not vapourware!

[thelonesun]

I want you to try to make a 25$ x86 computer. No pressure. Go ahead.

Re:Not vapourware!

[hawguy]

Even if you did create a $25 x86 computer that could run Windows, you'd have to add $100 for the Windows License.

Re:Not vapourware!

[sunderland56]

Whether it is "vapor" or not, if they are still going to ship with only Lin-sux and no proper OS (Windows or OS X) support, then the project is going to nose dive anyway.

Of all the computers that handled your message between your own computer and the slashdot servers, how many were running what you call a "proper OS"?

I bet that even the router in your own house doesn't run Windows.

Worrying state of affairs

[Nemyst]

Reading the post (I really suggest everyone does so, it's an enlightening read), I have to say this sounds particularly worrying. The government and local manufacturers almost seemed intent on stopping them from doing the work locally. Does that even make sense?

I can understand higher costs; the West won't accept salaries below a certain threshold, there's unions, and I entirely respect that. However, the schedule problem is ridiculous. A plant thousands of kilometers away from your main sales point can be faster to ramp up production than the shop down the street? We're not speaking about a small-scale project, either! I find this utterly unbelieveable. No wonder so much of the manufacturing goes overseas.

And then the taxing part is plain and simply dumb. You can't control corporations, but that the government actively deters local production? That's like shooting yourself in the foot and wondering why it hurts.

The UK and the West as a whole (I'm entirely sure that the UK is not a special case here) should be ashamed.

Re:Worrying state of affairs

[fermion]

When I read the post, I find it an example of a firm that is either extremely uninformed or extremely idealistic about the work the are trying to do.

First when one is creating a product to be mass manufactured, that fact must be designed in at the beginning, not tacked on at the end. It would be unrealistic to expect any product to be successful without working closely with the people who are going to manufacture it.

Second, profitable competent manufacturers in the west is not going to have excess capacity and skilled labour just twiddling their thumbs waiting for customers. These firms are going to have as close to maximum production as possible, and, as new customers come in, they will adjust schedules or add capacity as needed. In places where standards are not high, and people can be taken off the street to run machines, or it acceptable to have machinery idle just waiting for orders, this is different. In any case the pricing structure for manufacturing is not surprising. China has a lot of excess capacity right now, and they are likely just trying to cover costs. Any firm that keeps excess capacity for quick order in the west is going to have to charge a premium.

And the tax just seems like a red herring. Again, how does one enter into a venture without understanding the tax liabilities. I understand that firms do this all the time, and that is why so many go bankrupt, but really. One has a BOM, and one has access to people who know about this things. Getting to the end game and just then realizing that taxes, schedules, and shipping exists seems really lame.

Re:Worrying state of affairs

[Ramin_HAL9001]

So if your boss reduced your wages to $0.50 an hour tomorrow, you wouldn't object?

Not only that, but every employer in every company in your line of work reduced wages to $0.50 an hour at the same time, so leaving for a different job is out of the question. Then, as the businesses floundered, they started upping wages, but moving you into corporate owned housing which you rented out of your salary, preventing you from having enough free money to move to a different city and find a new job. Then the employers all started cutting corners in safety and working conditions, but you can't move elsewhere because you are too poor, and you can't complain because there is no union.

Anti-union types who are also middle class, mostly the religiously right-wingers, are so naive its pathetic. They so easily forget our recent history. That's not to forget the mob influence on unions, if people genuinely care about their livelyhoods, and the communities based on the jobs they all have, then they need a healthy union, free from the influence of corruption.

Re:Worrying state of affairs

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never belonged to a union, and every boss I've had has paid me more each year. Market forces take care of that.

Unions have nothing to do with the fact that companies cannot compete. Simple fact is you can bet if the corporation could off shore your job you would just be out of work like the millions who have already been displaced by cheap labour and the ability to outsource without intervention. We in the west live in a Walmart nation where you play the game or you are replaced,,,and any who think otherwise are fools or dreamchasers.

To paraphrase Steve Ballmer "goods and the price of producing them is becoming worthless therefore the real future in the north american (read USA) economy is in ``intellectual propery`` (read software)

The problem is once the imaginary intellectual property bubble bursts there will be no manufacturing economy left is the west to employ anyone...except perhaps funeral directors as more people reach their debt ceiling and find that getting down to earth without the parachute of a real job producing things is dicy at best.

So I say bring on this device and let the kids hack away with OSS software and learn machine logic at its core. That is how the information age revolution started including the wizards of silcon valley who now have grown too fat and stupid to realize that closing down fundamental computer learning with a closed computing environment like Windows has done little more than stiffle creativity and real learning.

I remember only too well my first cd of Visual Basic when it came out and how hard the ``programing guru`` teacher stressed why it was important to not have to know anything about how the computer actually worked...I just wish I could find it and post the stupid AVI file to show you how damaging the attitude expressed withing this $300 dollar mandatory learning tool for the college course I was taking really was...

Sure it contained the compiler and all the software necessary to quickly learn how to do basic GUI hacks. But as far as actually teaching me anything useful for core chip programming and machine logic it was useless. And this course was advertised as an advanced computer programming course along with the mandatory MS access SQL software and books that cost $500.

Essentially the first year of my learning was wasted by these jerks and I have spent the last 15 re-learning what I should have been taught in the first place and un learning how not to think about core processes!

Re:Is this really a big deal?

[dgatwood]

General purpose I/O pins normally only show up on expensive prototyping boards, not on "real" computers. I think the idea is that this will allow folks who couldn't otherwise afford such prototyping hardware to experiment with such things. I could easily see this being used for school science projects like BattleBots, those computer maze projects, and so on.

Similarly, real computers aren't small enough to trivially embed them into random crap around your house. I can think of lots of really fun pranks to pull with one of these and a small speaker.... :-D But then again, that's hobbyist stuff.

Re:Is this really a big deal?

[fotbr]

For quick hack-it-together devices, I'd rather have a cheap linux computer with some gpio pins that I can access via something like /dev/port0 than an arduino. I'm not sure that this Raspberry Pi is the perfect solution to that, but it's closer to what I want than a arduino is, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to deal with than hacking something together out of an old laptop or mini-itx board.

If I'm going to go back to playing with microcontrollers, I'm going to be working from a bare chip, custom boards, and assembly language, because to me, that was fun.

Arduinos have their place. This thing has its place. There might be some overlap, but there's a lot of situations where you'd pick one over the other. Choice is good, right?

Re:Is this really a big deal?

[sjames]

If you have kids, I'll bet you'd be more willing to let them take a soldering iron to a $25 machine than a $250 machine.