Slashdot Mirror
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."
After all of the accusations of vapourware, it's nice that they're actually making these.
To Eben, Liz and crew: Congratulations! Looking forward to watching you revolutionize computer education!
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
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.
I was checking this out last night and I'm actually quite excited for one to come out. I've been in the industry for years now but more on the superuser side. It'll be a really fun chance to actually have a computer where I have to learn some electronics and programming to really get the most use out of it... kind of like jumping into the deep end of the pond. It'll be my main home computer.
I usually recommend a USB flash drive for my students in my Unix course (taught on Macs at the school), and leave it up to them which Linux distro to run at home from the Flash drive. With prices this low, I could almost make it a requirement for the course. I'll hold off to see how they fare though.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
there is no need for democracy in communist China, because the people are already represented in government by the Communist Party.
funny corollary: There is no need for independent labor unions in China, because the government controlled labor union inherently represents the people's interests - after all, it too is controlled by the Communist Party.
as for the basic facts of history about unions and working conditions, well, you are just 100%, flat out wrong. i mean, its like you have tried to lecture me on mathematics by starting out with "the volume of a sphere is r cubed". no, its not r cubed. its not, its not even close, and any 3rd grader knows it from basic examination of the universe that is plain to their god given eyeballs.
I'm not talking about China, I'm talking about the UK and USA. And I'm not talking about the history of Labor unions, they've obviously been a powerful force in shaping worker's rights in the past. I'm talking about the present day.
I don't know what you saw in my post that made you think I was talking about historical working conditions or conditions in China.
All I'm saying is even if labor unions disappeared overnight, modern government regulations would prevent a return to the poor working conditions of the past. Perhaps worker's wages would drop, which could be a good thing (if you're an employer and want to compete internationally), or a bad thing (if you're an employee and your skills aren't in high demand).
You could say the same thing about the Arduino vs. one of thousands of sub-$2 microcontrollers.
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?
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.
The app store is called apt-get.
If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all.
Tax and duty are two different things. Anyone care to explain the actual situation there? Sounds like they're confused, at least.
Is there a specific semiconductor duty that doesn't apply to finished goods? (not sure that a board like this would count as 'finished' anyway, for duty purpose)
If they're bitching about VAT, I don't see how that would be any different, completed unit or not.
The only difference I can see is more margin on Chinese produced version, barring there is no duty on semis, as mentioned above... Which any idiot would well know, by walking into a wal-mart.
If you're looking for x86 SOC, Intel's new Medfield might be your best bet. Medfield article
If you were to give these the Raspberry Pi treatment...let's say a Pi board's cost is 1/2 cpu, 1/2 everything else. So the everything else is about...rounding up....let's say about 15 bucks. So add about $15 to whatever Intel charges for Medfield and you'd have your x86 Raspberry Pi.
It will be more expensive than $25 total, because...well...Intel is involved. No way a Medfield chipset will sell for ten bucks. But it would still be cheap and let you run Wine or other groovy stuff on a dinky cheap board.
It might be close though. I found this atom board for $57, and that's a full motherboard with a lot of expensive slots and heat sinks and the like. The actual Atom chip probably isn't more than $15-20 bucks. If Medfield is in this ballpark you could still be pretty cheap.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Bit annoyed that it's not made in the UK.
Why? Manufacturing them overseas lowers the price and makes them more accessible to students. IIRC the Raspberry Pi Foundation's stated goal is to teach children programming, not to bolster a failing industry at the expense of educators and hobbyists.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Not economical?
They explain this at the end of the article. One of the major factors is that there tax reductions for importing manufactured systems but not for components!!! Write to your MP today.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();