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Inside the Raspberry Pi Factory
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a photo walk through of how Raspberry Pi boards are made at a Sony factory in South Wales, UK. The factory says that the multiple automated and manual checks have meant that only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped with defects."
Nor have I. But I guarantee you I am much, much smarter and richer than you.
Whoever designed the photo album viewer never heard of XMLHttpRequest.
It's all about "page views", baby!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped with defects
1 of 5 of the boards I ordered recently was defective. It has the "can't keep the USB running" error. They were the 'Made in China" versions. Hopefully the Sony-made ones will be more reliable.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
So even if they have defects, they still get shipped, despite the numerous automated and manual checks?
What a way to keep people from being unemployed....
[wdw]
Since when do they ship in a clear plastic case as in the article?
From TFA only 2 bad boards so far? http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=20657 - see this problem on as detailed on rpi site.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
I think this: post from Pi is a better "walk-through", as it includes descriptions as well as pictures.
But, that's just me.
Can we have a moratorium on Raspberry Pi posts until they get 1.5M boards out there? Hardly a day goes by without some kind of Raspberry Pi astroturfing going on here and elsewhere, and yet in the US they are still not generally available.
Assuming that's even true, the difference is that you are probably not employed as a web developer. It's safe to assume that whoever created the photo album viewer GP mentioned is employed as a web developer, and is obviously not very good at his/her job if he/she can't figure out how to pass content from the server with AJAX. Unless, as someone else mentioned, the point is to inflate page views.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Ordered two from RS early October, along with peripherals. Other parts arrived with back order notice saying they would ship 26th November. Still hadn't arrived today so phoned RS who said shipping date was now 22nd December (a Saturday?). I'm sure the Raspberry Pi folk are a very nice group of people but honestly they just come over as a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs when it comes to global fulfillment.
Because in my experience, the yield from the chinese Model B factory is 50%.
My first RPi is currently tied up in a work project, so I ordered another model B from Newark. It came in and I fired it up yesterday, no LEDs or any signs of life. Dead.
Then I noticed the main BGA in the center of the card looked a bit askew, looked closer and noticed the BCM2835 was missing. The Samsung DRAM that ordinary sits on top of the '2835 was soldered straight onto the PCB. I understand the part shooter fucking up once in a while and missing a chip, but the board shouldn't have made it out of the factory.
C'mon. I'd rather pay a few extra bucks for something that's most likely going to work, than do what I'm doing now and spending even more bucks mailing the fucking thing back, and crossing my fingers that the replacement works too...
Remember, if you were one of the people denouncing everything SONY after the 'rootkit' affair - DO NOT BUY a Raspberry Pi, and don't forget to e-mail the Raspberry Pi Foundation and let them know how you feel about them collaborating with the enemy.
Don't be like TheGratefulNet who swore off SONY and then indirectly sent them his money anyway. In his own words: "sony is *fully* boycottable with very little pain involved. its easy to do." Perhaps he didn't know - but now YOU do. Do not buy RPi.
This message brought to you by Boycotts-R-Hilarious.
I'd never have ordered mine if I knew Sony gets something from making these.
Who read this as saying, "...the factory says that the multiple automated and manual checks have meant that only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped DUE TO defects" I mean, could explain the supply problem. Much more plausible that the entire world is being supplied by a half-dead 89 year old electronics engineer hand-building each one, occasionally losing his glasses between runs, with a crappy 1960's era Radio Shack soldering iron...
I don't see how the Raspberry Pi can compete with similar products like the MK808 or UG802. For $50 you can buy a cheap android on a stick PC loaded with built in features, and fully capable of customized the ROM. They have twice the computing power of the Pi, so why are people still interested in the Raspberry?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Am I the only person who misses having the internet viewable without JS? I mean, don't get me wrong, JavaScript can do great things but a lot of the time it really isn't necessary, and often doesn't fall back nicely when JS isn't available.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Every time you buy a Raspberry Pi, Sony gets a dollar.
I don't see how the Raspberry Pi can compete with similar products like the MK808 or UG802.
The other vendors aren't spamming all over tech sites.
(The Raspberry Pi people just take a really good system on a chip from China, slap it on a badly laid out board, and act like they've done something important. Annoying.)
Yes its just you.
You will always get shit code. Removing JS doesn't help that at all.
Geocities caused horrible atrocities without any JS.
and is obviously not very good at his/her job if he/she can't figure out how to pass content from the server with AJAX.
And if he were reaaally good at his job, he'd know that you don't need AJAX to swap pictures on screen. (Why did the GGP mention it anyway? I don't get it what it has to do with the task at hand anyway.)
Ezekiel 23:20
The UK computer industry enjoyed a mini-rennaisance in 2012 thanks to the popularity of the $40 Raspberry Pi
Are they serious? Do they even know where the ARM SoC is designed?
It amazes me that the Arm Holdings stock was only around $20 a few months ago, when they are without question the most dominant, stable, and secure tech company in the world. Both Apple and Google are completely dependent on the licenses they have acquired from ARM to allow them to use their risc based ultra low power cpu in their devices, and to allow the manufacturers (samsung, ti, etc) to build those chips, and yet in some cases their stocks are twenty times more.
This amazes me, but at least ARM's stock has doubled in the past few months. There is NO bigger player in the computer industry in the world than the UK. I make this claim upon the the fact that now mobile is the dominant platform, and ARM is the only real player in that game (as of yet). Anyone can license and manufacture these chips for cheap and give us crappy hardware as a result, but the ingenuity is in their reduced and low complexity instruction set which allows for their ultra low power design, which is why almost everybody is using their SoC designs.
The only reason that nobody realizes this and their stock has been stagnant in the past is because they don't have a "ARM inside" sticker on every ARM based device made. It there was such a sticker, they would be beyond any doubt the most popular company in the world.
Disclaimer: I am Canadian (and live there at the moment), but I am also a UK citizen. I also don't hold any ARM stocks, though I am kicking myself that I still have yet to acquire any, since it would have almost doubled in value over the past year.
Obviously, I'm not saying I'd rather see JS gone (well, not without a replacement - JS as a language is ugh), but rather I wish more sites would fall back to a non-JS version.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
By doing what, sending all of the images at once? That's great for a small album, less useful for large ones.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
yes but people end up using JavaScript to much to do things that html and css can do.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
they have some really slow SMT placement equipment.. The lines I program could knock that out in about half the time for SMT, and do most if not all connectors inline. I see why they produce more in china than there..
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
By passing all the image URLs and titles to the client once. Javascript can modify the DOM to replace the images at will by modifying the image source or adding additional image elements. That doesn't take any XMLHttpRequest requests to the server, so its not AJAX.
I LOL'd. Yes, the real thing holding back the UKs perceived dominance in the industry is lack of 'ARM inside' stickers. You probably think RIM got a bad rap too amiright?
Good-bye
Can be found here:
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
I just got mine 2 days ago, a new Model B Revision 2 board...
they claimed it was made in the UK but when I opened the static bag and pulled out the board a huge "MADE IN CHINA" stamped all over it
here is photo I took of my new model B Revision 2 board - http://www.flickr.com/photos/qoaa/8233431330/
you can clearly see made in china
here is another angle with made in china at top - http://www.flickr.com/photos/qoaa/8233433632/
My original order was placed in July 5th, 2012 and I just got it on December 1, 2012 in the mail. I live in Georgia, US so I knew it would take a while to get "across the pond" but was a let down seeing it was made in china when they promised revision 2 boards were made in UK and they clearly are not.
and yes i confirmed it's revision 2
cpuinfo/free/uname info - http://image.dude-suit.net/albums/userpics/10002/raspi1.PNG
Sure, but what's your point? It's easy to do bad things with Javascript, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a very flexible and useful language, and the only scripting platform supported by pretty much every browser.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Wow. You are really stretching my words to make that speculation. In no way did I refer to RIM, but just because I am Canadian you assume that I am a die hard RIM supporter. I am talking about the UK, not Canada. I will not go off topic of my own post, but responses like yours make me slowly loose hope for the Slashdot community.
To reiterate, my comment was that if such stickers existed, then they would be the most popular company in the world, since their chips are used in everything, but unfortunately they wouldn't be used in everything if they had such a requirement. ARM definitely does not have a bad rap, so you are definitely way off on the point of my topic.
If you think there is a lack of dominance from the UK in the industry, then you really know nothing about the industry. QED
and is obviously not very good at his/her job if he/she can't figure out how to pass content from the server with AJAX.
And if he were reaaally good at his job, he'd know that you don't need AJAX to swap pictures on screen. (Why did the GGP mention it anyway? I don't get it what it has to do with the task at hand anyway.)
At least you weren't trying to browse TFA on a tablet or phone...on my iPad, the first page and every other page after that was a warning that the page I wanted wasn't "mobile-optimized." If you can't code your page to be usable on all devices, you're doing it wrong.
(One minor point in their favor: at least they're not using that abortion known as Onswipe. Whoever decided scrolling should be replaced with pagination should be taken outside and shot.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Maybe they got pragmatic and decided the best way to bring in local jobs (Raspberry Pi = British,so jobs in the UK) was to find an existing plant that could take on the work. Maybe setting up their own factory from scratch was unrealistic for the Raspberry Pi organisation (these guys aren't an existing multinational megacorp, just a start-up, effectively) but they could at least try to get them manufactured in the UK and create some British/Welsh jobs. Perhaps they also felt this would allow them better quality control (an easy drive across the country for a few hours rather than a flight to Shanghai to check on facilities) and also be more ethical in terms of production line worker conditions. Puts them ahead of Apple, at least...
Indeed, mod parent up. Not all computers have to be networked, plenty of situations where that's a security risk, costs more for the unit.
Looks optimistic to me. Granted, mine is a small sample size but two out of three have failed. One boots but freezes after less than 5 minutes with no load, the other runs but does so too hot to enclose in any kind of case.