Raspberry Pi $25 Linux Computer Now In Production (Video)

Warning ! by psergiu · 2012-01-17 00:39 · Score: 5, Informative

Remember, the 1st batch of 10000 Raspberry Pi boards will ONLY be available from http://www.raspberrypi.com/ (you can order some nice stickers in the meantime)

Be aware that scam sites (like http://www.systemsofhull.co.uk/raspberry-model-p-261.html) have begun to pop-up. :-(

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Re:Warning ! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-17 00:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

My analysis of web analytics shows that given a link, someone percentage of people will click it.
Even if you explicitly say it's a scam, some people will click that link, AND fall for it.
And this even goes for sites with allegedly intelligent and tech savy demographics.
Re:Warning ! by psergiu · 2012-01-17 01:25 · Score: 4, Informative

Mr. Andrew Lamb (trading as Systems Of Hull),
Read the announcements on the official Raspberry Pi site - they have NOT made any deals with any resellers.
Also on the forum thread discussing this particular scam - the phone number given it's disconnected and the address of the presumed shop it's for an appartment complex.
Next time you try to scam people, at least be more beliveable.

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Re:Warning ! by psergiu · 2012-01-17 01:31 · Score: 3, Funny

Whoopsie.
Do NOT click the 2nd link, people !
:-)

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Re:Warning ! by tangelogee · 2012-01-17 01:40 · Score: 4, Funny

Do NOT click the 2nd link, people !
Great, now I HAVE to click it! Stupid reverse psychology...
:-)
Re:Warning ! by Tsingi · 2012-01-17 01:47 · Score: 2

Seems to work ok here.
Yeah, it works if I allow scripts globally. I don't see any particular source that I should be including and the list of blocked sources is a list I would like to stay blocked.
When I allowed scripts globally (for a few seconds) An Amazon tab I had open went nuts.
Blocked sites (12) are from google, amazon, ebay, facebook, openmedia.ca (?) visualwebsiteoptimizer.com (possibly the culprit), stumbleupon, and twitter.
Anyway, I'll give creating an account another try sometime in the future. Maybe they will clean up the XSS enough to allow the form to be filled out. And maybe they won't
Re:Warning ! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-17 02:06 · Score: 3, Informative

The main problem is that the SoC is difficult/impossible to buy in anything other than enormous quantities. Some of the Raspberry Pi people work at Broadcom, so they're in a slightly better negotiating position than everyone else.
Re:Warning ! by xaxa · 2012-01-17 02:15 · Score: 4, Informative

God you Slashdotters really are paranoid nutjobs, aren't you? Yes, I AM ANDREW LAMB. Moron. Thanks for proving my whole "crying wolf when he gets confused" theory beyond a doubt.
Funny, I thought the Raspberry Pi design was open-source. Funny kind of open-source if you all call "scam" on anyone who builds & sells them himself ... but hey, you found out his business address is his home address. Damn garage operations, they should all be closed down in favour of corporations.
If you are Andrew Lamb, you're hardly going to get customers with an attitude like that.
You should demonstrate how you're going to fulfil orders. The thread on the forums points out the problems -- why not respond to them?
Here's the best post from that thread:

1) He claims to be VAT registered but doesn't seem to want to state his VAT number. That is a bit strange. I think I will ring up HMRC and check he is registered. I hope he is otherwise he is committing tax fraud.
2) In his terms and conditions he states "All items are covered by a manufacturers 12 month warranty. If an item develops a fault it is best to request an RMA directly with the manufacturer." WRONG!. UK consumer law makes it crystal clear the seller is responsible for goods sold not the manufacturer. It is the sellers duty to mess about with the manufacturer.
3) He is advertising a product he can not honestly expect to have in stock. I suspect he will take people's money and simply tread water until he can get his hands on enough units to send out to people. This could take months and months.
4) He is selling products based on the PI that don't exist yet. I suspect he will simply grab the first "in-car entertainment" project that comes along and sell that. Nice.
5) He is profiting on a charity selling devices. He is doing nothing than attempting to make £4 for doing nothing other than adding delay and bureaucracy.
Re:Warning ! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-01-17 03:13 · Score: 2

Aside from the SoC procurement issues, I suspect that the demand for 3rd party spins might be fairly small(not zero; but fairly small): The Raspberry Pi people seem to be shooting for lowest cost, so there isn't a lot of pure margin for a 3rd party to cut into and manufacturing cheaper than the guys who are already attempting to manufacture cheap is going to be tricky.

With something like the Arduino, there was definitely room for a bunch of 3rd-party spins: the original was pretty expensive, included a lot of arguably optional parts; but was simple enough that redesigns were doable: hence the versions that could be constructed single-layer, through-hole only, the size-minimized 'shieldless' versions, the versions without USB-serial or RS232-TTL converters, etc.

It's a pity, really; because there are definitely some niche-focused spins of the board that I would like to see; but it will have to get pretty enormously popular before that is likely, and pure clones would be a cutthroat business to get into...
Re:Warning ! by dgriff · 2012-01-17 09:00 · Score: 2

And if you keep reading that thread you will find a post from the real Andrew Lamb which is so utterly different in tone that it is clear that the AC post is a troll by some sad bastard.

Re:Ardino competitor? by dave420 · 2012-01-17 00:46 · Score: 3, Informative

It is a Â£25 Linux PC.

Re:Ardino competitor? by klingens · 2012-01-17 00:54 · Score: 2

It's not an Arduino competitor but runs a normal, general purpose Linux distro of your choice.
However, you also have to provide an enclosure, a SD card and a 5V charger with USB plug for power.

Re:What would have been the cost to be UK-built? by TheRaven64 · 2012-01-17 00:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

and you'd have to wait 2-3 Months to get one rather than 2-3 weeks!!

There's some precedent for this in the UK. Some of the original Sinclair systems were sold for almost exactly the cost of production. They'd take the money, put it in the bank for a month, then buy the parts and build the machine for you. The interest that the money earned in that month was their profit margin.

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Even Cheaper DIY? by Doc+Ruby · 2012-01-17 01:06 · Score: 2

They're assembling these in Chinese factories. Which are cheap, but not $0. They're shipped from there to the consumers in EU and US (and others), which also costs more than $0 each.

If hobbyists could assemble them ourselves, they could be even cheaper than $25. And it's primarily hobbyists who are their market. How about it?

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Re:Even Cheaper DIY? by robthebloke · 2012-01-17 01:12 · Score: 2

Depends where you are in the world. The Pi isn't being made in the UK because you pay a flat fee on each component imported. It's far cheaper to simply pay the fee once for the complete product....
Re:Even Cheaper DIY? by ledow · 2012-01-17 01:16 · Score: 4, Informative

I think you miss the point -
It costs less to create and assemble the full product elsewhere and send it to the EU/US than it would do to buy the parts in the EU/US or have it assembled in the EU/US.
There's a post on their blog about this exact issue with regards to tax. Components taxed, finished product untaxed, with regards to importing things from abroad.
And unless the difference was HUGE, it wouldn't be worth doing it even if you could - people would expect a reduced price if they are DIY, but you wouldn't be able to ONLY reduce it by as much as it costs to assemble (because that's literally pence on an assembly line in a factory doing them all day). You really want to DIY it for $0.50 cheaper than buying a finished product? The admin costs alone would make it less profitable already. Most of the cost is in the components.
This is pretty much why China makes 99% of the stuff we see in the shops. For crazy tax reasons, and the fact that they produce in bulk, quicker (did you not see that the UK production would take 2-3 months instead of 2-3 weeks?) and cheaper, it's easier to send designs to China, have them source components, assemble them, test them and ship them to EU/US than it ever would be to do even one part of the process in the EU/US.
If you don't believe me, have a look at the OpenPandora project - still about 2-3 years behind schedule and the price has rocketed because they didn't bother to keep tabs on a large US company they used (which resulted in higher costs, poor reliability, thousands of PCB's sitting idle and rottiing before they could be soldered, etc.) and they had to switch to Germany to finish off the very first batch still and things are *STILL* taking months. But the components from the Chinese companies they used have been available since day one (putting aside stupid project management issues like expecting a Chinese factory to make thousands of cables from a unique design after a 3-year wait with no word from the OP team, and expecting the same price to do so as you were quoted at the start).
Re:Even Cheaper DIY? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-17 01:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

They are basically impossible for hobbyists to assemble without specialised equipment. Soldering is done by reflow - the company would need to supply a solder mask stencil to every purchaser. These are usually made from stainless steel, are reused hundreds or thousands of times, and can be more expensive to produce than a single circuit board. For highest reliability, most components require specific temperature profile curves to be followed in a programmable reflow oven. If you mess up the soldering of a BGA chip, they need to be removed and reballed, which is very difficult without specialised equipment. Automated circuit board assembly is very efficient - components are supplied on reels or on trays and are placed by a robot. For a kit, someone would need to count out, pack, and label each component - the kit market is comparatively small, so there aren't industrial sized machines that will do this automatically. So even if you could buy a kit, it would probably be more expensive than a fully assembled board, and there would be a minuscule chance of it working the first time. If you did actually have the skills and equipment to assemble such a board at home, you would know that the assembled price is so low that it would not be worth your time.

Re:What would have been the cost to be UK-built? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-17 01:08 · Score: 2, Informative

You've ignored two reasons why it would be more expensive if made in the UK.
Firstly, we don't make all the require components in the UK, so they'd have to be shipped in anyhow. This attracts an import tax.
Secondly, and more relevantly, the import tax law is flawed; you don't have to pay tax on the items which pre-assembled, even if they are made from the same components which, seperately, would be taxed.

Auctioning versus selling, optimum pricing by chrb · 2012-01-17 01:12 · Score: 2, Insightful

$25 is under valued given the demand that there is for this device. They should consider auctioning some percentage of the first batch on ebay, and then use the extra profits to fund further development. I know plenty of people who would happily bid up to $75 if given the chance.

Re:Auctioning versus selling, optimum pricing by betterunixthanunix · 2012-01-17 01:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

Pricing it higher would defeat the point. They wanted to make a computer that was affordable and reasonably powerful.

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Re:Auctioning versus selling, optimum pricing by Crookdotter · 2012-01-17 01:20 · Score: 5, Informative

Whoa - they already did. Did you watch the video? The first went for $5000
Re:Auctioning versus selling, optimum pricing by ajo_arctus · 2012-01-17 01:34 · Score: 2

They could have sold 10,000 early access/ developer boards at $50 a piece, maybe even doing a 'buy one give one' promotion like the OLPC project. It does kind of defeat the purpose of computers for all, but it'd also helped them guarantee future production...
Re:Auctioning versus selling, optimum pricing by BetterSense · 2012-01-17 02:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

I agree completely."Not charging enough" seems to be a classic blunder for these kind of grassroots startup hardware efforts. I watched the Open Pandora and Always Innovating Touchbook under development for years, until the more established industry finally got around to producing mass-market semi-equivalents and their window of glory was passed by before they could ramp up. There was enough demand for either that they could have easily taken preorders for twice or 3 times the price they wanted. Pre-order customers, frustrated with how long it was taking, would literally offer to pay more to take delivery sooner, but ... they were fixated on selling their product for some magic-number price, rather than what they could get for it.
Re:Auctioning versus selling, optimum pricing by chrb · 2012-01-17 04:39 · Score: 2

Why are you against people voluntarily giving more money than asked for to a charity? And why are you so angry? You need to chill out bro.

First batch to be the $35 version by Senior+Frac · 2012-01-17 01:20 · Score: 4, Informative

The post is a bit misleading. My understanding is that this first production batch is to be the $35 version which is what the developers are clamoring for.

Re:Ardino competitor? by psergiu · 2012-01-17 01:48 · Score: 2

If you are able to solder by yourself BGA package-on-package components, congratulations. Over 99.9% of the potential buyers are not, so it will only come pre-assembled.
You DO have to reach for the soldering iron if you want to use the GPIO,SPI,I2C & UART pins to connect a 1.27mm pitch header to the board.

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Re:What would have been the cost to be UK-built? by Canazza · 2012-01-17 01:51 · Score: 4, Informative

this is the blog post: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509

We investigated a number of possible UK manufacturers, but encountered a few problems, some of which made matters impossible. Firstly, the schedule for manufacture for every UK business we approached was between 12 and 14 weeks (compared to a 3-4 week turnaround in the Far East). That would have meant you’d be waiting three months rather than three weeks to buy your Raspberry Pi, and we didn’t think that was acceptable.
Secondly, we found that pricing in the UK varied enormously with factories’ capacity. If a factory had sufficient capacity to do the work for us, they were typically quoting very high prices; we’d expected a delta between manufacture pricing between the UK and the Far East, but these build prices not only wiped out all our margin, but actually pushed us into the red. Some factories were able to offer us prices which were marginally profitable, but they were only able to produce at most a few hundred units a month; and even then, we were doing better by more than five dollars per unit if we moved that manufacture to the Far East. When you’re talking about tens of thousands of units per batch, losing that sum of money for the charity – a sum that we can spend on more manufacture, more outreach work and more research and development – just to be able to say we’d kept all the work in one country, starts to look irresponsible.
I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. 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. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

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Re:HD Alarm clock... by JustNiz · 2012-01-17 02:09 · Score: 2

>> being able to text your car and get its location

My car never seems to go anywhere on its own.

Re:What would have been the cost to be UK-built? by Lumpy · 2012-01-17 02:14 · Score: 2

If you think someone will hand solder them you are nuts.

Those boards are machine placed, paste solder globs placed and then oven reflow baked to make the BGA processor stick to the board.

The only part that is hand assembled is putting the boards in a box after placing in the testing jig.

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Re:Ardino competitor? by PopeRatzo · 2012-01-17 02:16 · Score: 2

If it's not fully assembled on my receipt, I'd like to assemble it myself and save even more money with an even cheaper device. Why pay for Chinese assemblers and shipping through China?

Then why pay for the board at all? First, you get your hands on some silicon...

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Solar powered? by aaaaaaargh! · 2012-01-17 02:24 · Score: 2

Out of curiosity, I'm wondering whether it would be possible to hook a Raspberry Pi up to a 10'' LCD display and make it solar powered? There is a lot of sun where I live.

How large would the solar panels have to be to provide the power on an ordinary sunny day?

Re:What would have been the cost to be UK-built? by petermgreen · 2012-01-17 02:28 · Score: 2

for some odd reason.

The problem is that duty levels are set to placate certain interests not to make the system make sense as a whole.

Also afaict customs dutys are set by the EU as a whole not by indvidual countries which means there is even more beuracracy.

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Re:HD Alarm clock... by ledow · 2012-01-17 02:42 · Score: 2

Arduino GSM /GPRS / GPS-Shield: 126,05 â
optional GSM Antenna âoeAT-TG.09.0113â : 9,92 â
optional Power Supply: 8,40 â
Arduino GSM / GPRS / GPS-Shield â" Kit : 158,82 â

excl. VAT. plus Postage.

Not including the Â£/â 50 to buy an Arduino (and VAT is about 20% at the moment).

It would cost me less to buy a small netbook than it would to buy the shield on its own! Or five Raspberry Pi's. Or one Raspberry Pi, a bluetooth USB adaptor, a bluetooth GPS (dirt cheap, pound-store stuff now) and a 3G dongle (which places will throw at you now to get you out of the store) about 2-3 times over AT LEAST. Hence I could build three of these projects for the price of starting to build one with an Arduino.

This is my point. I have all the necessary hardware to make a standard PC do this already (several times over). Raspberry Pi makes it cheap enough and powerful enough to do in a portable, low-power device using the same software, such that I don't need Arduino or have to start everything from scratch with new hardware. And that's why I've always just completely ignored Arduino - because of the price of even the initial setup.

Arduino is fine if you have money to burn or expertise and time to do lots of stuff yourself. Otherwise, give me Raspberry Pi and an ARM Linux repository and I could knock up the same project, quicker, for less, and even re-use it later on other hardware if necessary.

Re:HD Alarm clock... by ledow · 2012-01-17 02:45 · Score: 2

Nice that you live in a nice area. ;-)

My purpose would be a) security monitoring (I text the car, it tells me where it is), b) location awareness (car "knows" if it's moving and sends me a text), c) Finding my car in a strange town (I'm very forgetful and lost my car for over an hour once in Hannover).

Re:HD Alarm clock... by ledow · 2012-01-17 02:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

Ah, Slashdot. The only post-2000 website that can't understand Euro symbols or British pound-signs.

Re:Maybe some potential by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-01-17 03:29 · Score: 2

Assuming that particular bit is flipped...

"Media" SoCs in general(Broadcom certainly no exception) tend to combine a reasonably normal, open, well-understood ARM or MIPs general-purpose CPU with a GPU and/or hardware video decode unit. If you are lucky, these will be supported in some way(I think the BCM part here has a ~15mb blob of mystery powering the graphics bit); but they tend to be excitingly locked down because the manufacturers want to be able to sell them as set-top boxes and other areas where team DRM holds sway.

Even on devices that are "open" in the sense that the boatloader doesn't cryptographically lock out unsigned or self-signed kernels, it may well be the case that the media-related peripherals will lock out unsigned firmware blobs, which allows specific features of the peripheral to be locked or unlocked by the manufacturer without the expense of respinning the die(eg. for devices that are or are not H264 patent-paid.)

Re:HD Alarm clock... by JoeMerchant · 2012-01-17 03:34 · Score: 2

Yeah, my 3.5 year old 42" LCD backlit TV is an ancient artifact, should really scrap it for that 63W power draw difference, except, wait, at $0.11/kwh, it's only costing $63 per year extra to run it 24/7/365, and it will take 10 years for the electricity costs to have any hope of covering the cost of a new screen. Maybe I should hang onto it until the next generation of tech comes out and makes LED backlighting look like striking sparks from flint.

BTW, I've got a Chumby, sorry to say, it sucks. I still use it, but that doesn't change the fact that the software is clunky, the WiFi is weak, and the processor is dog-slow. Still, it's a better alarm clock than anything I ever had before - plays Pandora for the alarm (when the WiFi works), and shows me a live feed from an IP cam.

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Raspberry Pi $25 Linux Computer Now In Production (Video)

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