Official, Customized Raspberry Pi Versions Coming Soon (linuxgizmos.com)

DeviceGuru writes: The immensely popular Raspberry Pi will soon be offered in customized versions, through an exclusive arrangement between Raspberry Pi Trading and Element14. According to the companies' announcement, Element14 will provide design and manufacturing services to OEM customers to create 'bespoke designs' based upon the Raspberry Pi technology platform. That's weird U.K. English for saying that contracts for creating customized Raspberry Pi SBCs will entail substantial NRE fees and 3,000 to 5,000 unit orders, depending on the nature of the customization. The tweaked Pi's are likely to have revised board layouts, additional or alternative functions, interfaces, connectors, and memory configurations, and more. A handful of unsanctioned Raspberry Pi knock-offs have already appeared over the past couple of years, including various Orange Pi and Banana Pi flavors, which certainly didn't involve any 'bespeaking.' More info is at Element14's CustomPi page.

Comments

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

They definitely have my interest, we're buying Pis and knocking off the USB connectors and replacing them with header pins for internal sensor gear that we're repackaging into a small container to resell. Thing is, right now we're moving dozens of the things (they are pretty specialized), we'd probably never be able to sell 5000.

Re: Finally!

[spire3661]

Buy an Intel NUC if you want that. The latest 14nm NUCs are $140 on amazon right now. I have one setup using just bare OpenElec running 2 GB of Ram for $160 total. To get an RPi to that point i would need the PI, a NICE case, a power supply, SD card, IR receiver, Bluetooth and Wifi modules. Best case scenario for the PI is $30+15+7+10+8+10+10=$90 for a vastly inferior machine. Dont get me wrong i LOVE the PI 2 i have. I have 3 of them with the official Pi touchscreens, i jsut understand its limitations. They are for making terminals, not servers (for the record i ran a static website with a year uptime on an Pi no problem), For $70 more a NUC makes a VASTLY better choice.

Re:!education

[KGIII]

I've taken on (adopted, really), quite some time ago, funding the local elementary school's entire in-class IT education. They only have 56 students. For instance, I've bought the whole school laptops and, this year, I bought them all iPads plus a half-dozen extras for eventual mishaps. The solitary IT staff and teachers really appreciate it but not nearly as much as the kids do. The bake me cookies, have visited my house for nature walks, invite me to plays, make me crafts, send me Christmas cards, and I usually even get a box of "I love you" Valentine's Day cards. It is awesome but their acting and 'music' leave a lot to be desired.

I say that because I want to ask this: You seem knowledgeable. These are K-6 students. The project type that I'm thinking of could be a long-term thing where the students would just keep the device. Financing is trivial, not even remotely an issue. What sort of projects could the kids, reasonably, do with these devices that they could us, say, throughout the year and then keep the device at the end of the year or, perhaps, half year? What kind of support would be offered (if needed, if any)? And would it make the solitary, just one, IT staff pull his hair out or otherwise hate me? Would they be used? Would it be beneficial at their level?

I specifically target the younger kid's education because they're local, they are fewer, and my actions can be more meaningful. The older kids get bused off to a larger school and I'm not fond of the administration there.

Thoughts? No? Just a passing idea but I suspect this would be something I'd need to prep ahead of time to make sure they're ready for incoming students next year as well as making sure that the teachers were familiar with them enough to actually give instruction. They could even make multiple devices or even make stuff that stayed in the school. Perhaps some sort of timer to control the sprinkler's for their little veggie garden? But I'm thinking things to take home. This number might mean that the students could use, damage, and simply keep the devices. It needn't be a single year that does the projects, either. This sort of stash will last them quite a while, I'd suspect.

It's kind of off-topic but I don't know if it's worthy of an Ask Slashdot and I don't generally submit anything for I am a lazy git and almost a passive consumer these days.