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Raspberry Pi Production Delayed By Factory's Assembly Flub
nk497 writes "The first shipment of Raspberry Pi devices has been delayed, after the factory manufacturing the cheap educational computer used non-magnetic jacks instead of ones with integrated magnetics. The problem is already nearly fixed, but new jacks need to be sourced for subsequent shipments, so those could be delayed slightly. 'It's inevitable, isn't it — you're freewheeling along perfectly happily and then you get a puncture,' said spokeswoman Liz Upton, apologizing for the delay."
Can someone explain to me what advantage a magnetic 8P/8C connector has over a non magnetic one? I have no idea where this would be used. My cables have that little lock tab not a magnet. Does it not need the little tab anymore (that always breaks off)?
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
From the Raspi forums :
"It doesn’t mean no network connection at all on all devices, but this board has been designed for a magnetic jack. The magnetic bits mean better signal integrity, better filtering and shorter transmission distances for data."
"Magnetics refers to the presence of transformers and chokes which are used to isolate the Ethernet wires from the RaspPi’s power supply. and each other and probably to reduce high-frequency noise. Without them you would effectively tie the RX and TX signals together and probably turn the entire network into an aerial for Radio 2 reception."
The magnetics in question aren't to hold the connector in like those in a Mac power cord, but rather the tiny transformers that are required for Ethernet differential signal isolation/transformation.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
>convert from differential to single-ended signals
Actually the signals are still differential. Take a look at the datasheet of any Ethernet magnets before commenting.
They were there to isolate, impedance match (if necessarily) and common mode filtering.
I think many people, me included, have been expecting something like this to happen. As said in the article, this is a relatively minor bump in the road that was practically inevitable and they seem to be handling it as well as could be expected.
I suspect they’ll get a bit of flack over the “4 day” thing... however they would have gotten a lot of flack if they came out with some information that turned out to be incorrect. I guess they could have come out saying “there is a minor problem and we are investigating”... but we aren’t talking credit card leaks here, and a few days to figure out what exactly happened seems fair enough to me.
I certainly don't think this is time to start panicing and referencing OpenPandora.
...and they could have built them at multiple Western factories, encouraging the revival of a local electronics industry rather than cementing dependence on the Far East. Once economy of scale kicked in, the price would have gone down anyway. I'd have happily sponsored any opportunity to decrease the chronic (and now quite severe) unemployment in Britain since it decided that an advanced country can operate without building anything on its own, relying on the ability to exploit less developed countries.
I can understand this critisism as I've had it many times over many different periods of "omg, not another <whatever> story".
But I'm way too damned excited over the Rasperry Pi to care! Kinda fun being on the other side of things for a change :D
How do they work?
Bye Bye, my Raspberry Pi,
I thought that I might buy you,
but the warehouse was dry,
those good old boys say just wait one more month,
but you keep running into delays,
yeah, you keep running into delays.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I have, thank you, and the transformer can be used to do exactly what I said as well as for pure isolation with the resultant signals retaining their differential status. Please consider that there are other Ethernet circuits than the one(s) you're familiar with before making general statements. Some really do need single-ended signals into the PHY.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Maybe they were using the wrong kind of tyres.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
It's what happens when you have too many chiefs and no indians...
I was going to make a joke about suicide due to the shame of making this mistake, but then I remembered that this is a Chinese factory. DON'T KILL YOURSELF!
They advertise the hell out of their product, then they predictably can't deliver, then they silence any and all criticism on their forum (because not being all positive is "bad attitude", and they don't allow that), then another disaster strikes. I guess it's called karma.
If you order now, you're going to get a delivery estimate about 3 months from now. Their mailing list had more than 100000 subscribers, and Liz Banhammer has the audacity to claim surprise when demand exceeds the initial 10000 batch.
Fucking magnets! How do they work?
Actually, no. This is what happens when you outsource manufacturing to vendors in countries like China where it is common practice for them to quietly substitute parts between the reference design stage and when the device hits production. Sometimes, you get lucky and they even tell you in advance that they're doing this and you have a chance to evaluate impact on the design. Most times, they simply do it and pocket the difference in cost while hoping not to get caught.
Still good value?
What about when the returns start flooding in because a 1 cent component failed when a 2 cent one might have soldiered on? Budgeted for handling that?
I know these guys are amateurs, but do they really need to keep demonstrating it?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Especially those pesky safety/redundancy and over-engineered components.
That said, the Raspberry Pi guys did a pretty good job explaining why they pretty much had to outsource to meet their goals.
And finally also to remove DC components, many PHYs have a constant DC component on their output lines because it's easier to vary the output currents while keeping it in the same direction than it is to change the direction of a current while maintaining smoothness.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Still looks pretty viable to us.
- Every electronics company
yes, amateurs. JUST LIKE Apple, Dell, HP... The only difference is that they are letting us know every step of the way what's going on.
FFS, EVERYTHING is made in china. The cost difference is not (entirely) the fabrication costs, it's that they would have been paying taxes on EVERY COMPONENT. Making it in china they don't pay any taxes on the thing AT ALL. In addition, even WITH the delay from both this and the crystal, the time to spin up production in the UK would have ment a longer timeframe to making them avalible.
So yes, it's still a good value.
No, the main reason it's not financially sensible to manufacture mass-appeal items in the UK is that the unemployment benefits are higher than chinese assembly workers' wages. You can't get native brits to take on menial work as they can get more money for being unemployed than, for example, picking vegetable or jobs that other stoop labour industries can afford to pay.
If these boards were to be assembled in the UK the costs of doing so (setting aside component costs and amortised developemnt costs) would make each board massively more expensive.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Why do you assume that the same mistake - or one like it - would NOT have been made if the boards were assembled in the west? Since western wage rates are so much higher than chinese ones if this error had been made in a british or american plant it would probably be cheaper to simply crush the whole batch and start again,
Then instead of a 1 month delay, you'd be waiting 6 months - or never, since the RPi foundation would have gone bust as it was banking on the sales of these units.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
How many people are killing themselves trying to keep up production with the demand for Raspberry Pi.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
This sort of thing is precisely why the standard Slashdot rant of "all they did was put x, y and z together, this isn't innovating!" is so much silliness. It's not easy to mass produce things. It takes planning and more planning. It takes money and more money than you planned on because some small aspect of Murphy's law is going to pop up and rip your balls off.
It's why the Motorola Xooms of the world come with stupid little missing bits and even why our fearless denizen of perfection, Apple, still screws first releases up 99 times out of a 100.
Production electronics is not building a Heathkit in your bedroom.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
From TFA:
It's actually very hard to tell unless you look at the insides of the part,
Ohmmeter?
Have gnu, will travel.
This is also what happens when you talk about whatever fuckup occurred on the dark end of your super-fancy-don't-look-too-closely-contemporary-JIT-outsourced-supply-chain...
Consumer electronics widgets are constantly having their ship dates quietly revised, usually with a terse announcement from some PR flack that 'Release of Widget Foo has been moved from late Q1 to mid Q2'. Or they just go up for pre-order and take longer than initially promised to ship. Annoying; but hardly unusual.
In this specific case, I'm a bit surprised that they didn't have somebody plug one into their laptop and then wonder why the NIC wasn't working slightly earlier in the process; but so it goes.
The release has been a cluster frak:
I have said it before: They should have stuck with the original plan and got the original shipment out and THEN license the technology to other companies. That why I'm not ordering for at a few more weeks until they get their crap together.
In this specific case, I'm a bit surprised that they didn't have somebody plug one into their laptop and then wonder why the NIC wasn't working slightly earlier in the process; but so it goes.
Reading through the forums, it sounds like they were sent early test boards which contained the correct connector before the full run. Sounds to me like the "accident" happened between the test run boards being signed off on and the full run.
Great point. One you have the BOM for the Raspberry Pi, doing the actual engineering is fairly cut and dry. Much of the work that goes into bringing a product like this to market is down-costing the BOM and figuring out the manufacturing logistics.
I recently brought a product to market and I had no idea what I was getting myself into before hand. There is a ton to consider.
I have only dabbled in electronics, but I don't care for the term "magnetics" (nor I have ever heard it before). I would think "inductor" would be a better term. Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about care to illuminate what the difference is between "magnetics" and inductors?
Better known as 318230.
Raspberry Pi Forever
You probably meant Open Source. Open Sores is what you end up with when Apple does you once every few months and you take it gladly.
I've said it before and I'll say it again and again and again. The release was insanely successful. This is a small crew with a fairly limited budget. They essentially sank all the cash they had into the first 250k and I am amazed that they still came together and are going to be able to get the first batch out without a major delay. I'm guessing licensing to these two companies had something to do with it. With no pre-orders how are they going to give preferred status to the early orders? The first 10k people get theirs shipped first so yeah they got preferred status. Do you mean the mailing list? It took them days to send out all of the emails it ended up being impossible they had over 100k people on the mailing list and only 10k boards. When apple sells out of iPhones for a month its a huge success, when this tiny company sells out a quarter of a year already its a huge fail... I don't think so this release has been insanely successful the only thing they could have done better is if they had more cash to set up the initial shipment better but alas the money tree crop hasn't been doing so well for the world lately and for a tiny group of people doing something to save the world they did damned good.
As opposed to what? Every electronic device in my home was made in china. They all work flawlessly.
Every computer on the planet has components made in China. What, exactly, is the alternative?
"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)."
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509
[Posted on January 10th, 8.5 weeks ago - and manufacturing had already started at that point].
I guess UK manufacturing wouldn't have been much slower, after all.
RS
Nah, the Indians would have fucked it up just as badly as the Chinese.
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