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First Run of Raspberry Pi Boards To Be Completed Feb 20th
An anonymous reader writes "Raspberry Pi has confirmed the first batch of $35 PCs will be constructed on February 20. They've also coaxed Broadcom into releasing the datasheet for the board. Apparently the company hit a snag with the quartz crystal package so there was a manufacturing delay, but it's since been resolved and things are on schedule for later this month."
From the announcements: "Eben and I may be going to China to make sure that the boards can be brought up properly for that date if necessary. We’ll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month."
For Asian markets, why dont they ship directly from China instead of moving them to UK first and then shipping them to their destinations
Infact, for all non EU destinations wont it make more sense to ship directly from China?
Will avoid multiple customs duties as well. (no customs will need to be paid for the UK entry)
I predict all of the Pi stories will move from my Slashdot RSS feed to my Hackaday RSS feed.
Wait. I thought these were supposed to be **$25**?
Yeah, and I thought they were coming without ethernet ports, but we were both wrong, and I'm happier for it.
If the $25 board came out first, I'd have to buy both flavors, this way I can just get the one I really want.
Raspberry Pi has confirmed the first batch of $35 PCs will be constructed on February 20
To save any ambiguity, the actual release says:
The good news is that this finally means we have a date for the first batch: the boards will be finished on February 20
Read up on it for more information. This is my understanding of it:
The first run is of the Model B, as they anticipate more people are interested in that set of hardware. Their FAQ likely provides more in-depth information that what I have provided here.
Troll, but:
Don't have a TomTom then?
Or one of the thousands of set-top boxes that use it?
Don't have a TV from a big-name manufacturer (e.g. Sony to name one) with media capabilities?
Don't have a Kindle?
Don't have an Android phone?
Seems to me that Sony, Kindle, Android, TomTom are all big-names and all in the consumer market where almost everyone has at least one themselves, or certainly know someone with one. That's without even trying to dig for more information, too.
P.S. How's Windows Phone coming along?
It doesn't ship with Linux. Or any other operating system. You can buy an SD card with Linux pre-installed, but that's a separate purchase.
We appreciate your prediction that it has a good chance of succeeding.
There's a fair amount that's been removed from this datasheet from the full BCM2835 one - all the parts that aren't accessible from the ARM have been taken out. It wasn't that these bits were secret per se, but that it took effort to produce the edited version.
.. with no case (just bare board)...
I made a quick check and if you have a replicator or access to one or a friend with one, thingiverse seems to be flooded with different case designs for the pi. I would not be surprised if a replicator owner would squirt one out for you in exchange for a six pack.
I have noticed over the years that /. is stereotypically wimpy about basic handyman skills... Buy a box at radio shack or home depot electronics dept and drill a couple holes in it, no problemo...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Already some great cases proposed here
http://www.raspberrypiforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9
What does the quartz crystal do? Is it like the crystal radio I made when I was 9? Does the Pi do wi-fi via a cat's whisker? Or does the quartz crystal control the clock like my dad's wristwatch? Or is it a "healing crystal" for absorbing the dangerous electromagnetic radiation that the Pi almost certainly emits. Wait, it says the "quartz crystal package". Does the Pi come embedded in a crystal???
Please excuse me for not being geek enough to know this already. I had no idea that computer boards had quartz crystals on them.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I am delighted by the Model B(and will probably soon own more than I can strictly justify...); but I must confess that I find the Model A's purpose in life to be a trifle baffling(except as a sort of 'arduino murderer for non-power-constrained applications').
If all of a school's other computer-related needs are already covered, getting together a programming environment equal or superior to a 700MHz linux box with 128 MB of RAM should be comparatively simple via LiveCD, PXE boot, VM, installing cygwin(or python for windows, or Visual Studio The First Hit is Free, Kid. Edition, or whatever).
If a school currently has deeply inadequate computer resources, the "Well, for $25/unit(plus monitor and peripherals, and probably a USB hub if the monitor doesn't include one, because 1 USB port isn't even enough for a mouse and keyboard, let alone flash drives and whatnot) we could buy a CS education setup or, for 35$/unit(plus monitor and peripherals, and a USB hub if needed for more than mouse and keyboard) we could buy a CS education setup that can also be pressed into service for internet stuff, and accessing/saving files from the other computer lab, etc." dilemma seems trivially tilted in favor of the revision B unit.
Even if these are designed to be a per-pupil thing, making the device more useful to its owner(and able to obtain additional tools without an existing computer and an SD cardreader, make programs that do HTTP stuff, etc.) seems like it would be worth the $10.
The value of ethernet only gets larger if there exists, or comes to exist, a toolkit for managing/updating/backing up/etc. the things over a network. Flashing SD cards is hardly a total killer; but these things don't have to be in service too long before the ability to perform operations across all of them over the network becomes worth the upfront cost...
My understanding is that anybody who obtains the full version of all Broadcom datasheets, unless placed under an NDA of Greater Warding, will have everything he needs to discover their CEO's true name(in The Old Tongue) by which he can be banished forever from the temporal plane.
Understandably, he is kind of touchy about that.
>Has anyone found any reason why it was secret?
It still is. Whole thing is a GPU/FPGA with glued in ARM core. They released all the ARM details, but omitted everything about GPU/FPGA.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
It's not quite the Apple TV, Boxee or Roku killer... yet. While the SoC supports a fair number of codecs, only a small number are licensed at this point (see the Pi FAQ), and if you have hopes for Flash and Silverlight based streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) , that's not going to happen unless Chrome or Firefox release a browser with embedded support.
The "VideoCore IV" (aka BCM2763) is hardly mentioned, so the answer is that this document doesn't include the interesting parts. When they say it could be used to port a new OS to the chip, that port wouldn't include any interesting [accelerated] video output.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
They're only making them in batches of 10,000 so I don't think there's a risk of them over producing giving their current demand. If the number of people subscribed to the mailing list and raspberry pi forums is any indication of interest they will easily sell several 10,000 lots this year. Many people, myself included are interested in buying multiple of these devices each.
If you compare the $50 roku to the $35 raspberry pi, the $50 roku contains no ethernet port, no usb port and no SD card. It also only support 720P instead of the 1080P the raspberry PI supports. The $35 raspberry pi has more hardware features and is $15 less expensive than the $50 roku. The $50 roku does come with a remote control and free shipping which the $35 raspberry pi does not have.
http://www.elektor.com/products/kits-modules/modules/070039-91-software-defined-radio.91475.lynkx
http://sdr-radio.com/
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I've been spoiled with linux on modern machines, so I don't have much experience running it in resource-strapped environments. Do you think I could run this machine as a file server if I put a text-mode linux distro on it?
Also, that's not ARM, it's MIPS. Worse, it's Microchip's PIC32 version of MIPS, which uses a crippled version of gcc with optimization levels above -O1 disabled unless you buy a really expensive license from Microchip that's DRM-locked to one particular PC. I think there are also code size limitations in the free (as in beer) toolchain.
I have noticed over the years that /. is stereotypically wimpy about basic handyman skills...
The funny part is, in the last Raspberry Pi story about 2/3 of the comments were complaints that you couldn't get the SMD and BGA parts as a kit to hand solder.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
because of the rounded corners.
Wait, what?
When did this turn into an Apple design patent issue?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.