Raspberry Pi heading to customers next week
The Raspberry Pi should start heading to pre-order customers early next week, following the completion of emissions tests.
The $35 credit card-sized computer, built around a Broadcom system-on-chip and designed to offer an affordable 'tinkerbox' for the enhancement of computing education, hasn't had an easy route to retail. Manufacturing began in January, but shipments were delayed while tax issues were resolved and a distribution network organised with partners Farnell and RS.
When the device finally did go on sale in February, high demand shut down both websites and panicked the retailers into demanding Conformité Européenne (CE) certification before any boards could be shipped to customers. Disappointment led to an angry backlash as consumers, many of whom had been waiting since the original estimated release date of September last year, saw the launch pushed back once more.
Thankfully, the delays look to be finally coming to an end. The Foundation's spokesperson, Liz Upton, has confirmed the Raspberry Pi boards have passed the emissions tests required to obtain a CE mark, making them legal for sale in the UK. 'Given that we've had the [anechoic testing] chamber for the whole week, we've used the time to make sure that alongside the CE requirements, the Raspberry Pi also complies with FCC regulations (USA) as well as CTick (Australia) and what we’ve been calling "that Canadian thing."'
While testing was completed last week, the paperwork has taken somewhat longer. 'Our partners hope to begin shipping units to those at the front of the queue around the start of next week,' Upton explains, giving hope to those who braved the unintentional DDoS on the suppliers' websites and actually managed to place an order hope for the future.
Boards are also being shipped to a 'small number of developers we have pre-selected outside the Foundation this week,' thanks to newly-appointed educational coordinator Myra VanInwegen. These developers are believed to be selected based on their experience with computing in education, and will help drive the development of the platform ahead of its full-scale 'commercial' roll-out as a boxed product for schools and universities later this year.
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16 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replyits not exactly fair to compare a $359.99 computer to a $35 one is it?
Also 1 million? majority of them must have been RS, Farnell rep stated 59K interest.
What about the specs of the Pi make you think that? It is more than capable of 1080p decoding over HDMI which is the main thing for a HTPC to do I would have thought.
Kimbie
That is probably the number only for your country, i don't think 59k users could DDoS the global Farnell website that easily.
Some people just act like the world owes them, unfortunately.
We're all waiting for it to arrive...the way I see it, it's a bit of fun, it's cheap...it'll turn up when it turns out. No idea why people are getting arsey about it either.
It is promising that the original Xbox managed to decode practically everything except h.264 using only a 700MHz chip, but that was an x86 chip - the RasPi uses ARM and therefore the clock speeds are not directly comparable, and it's a slightly older ARM instruction set.
It is a phenomenally powerful piece of kit for ~$35, but just don't expect to plug one into your TV and have a complete HTPC experience. At least not straight away, anyway; we will doubtless see some pretty nifty optimisations, but that stuff isn't going to happen overnight.
Eventually I plan to get my hands on a couple of these... It's more than capable of being a "general purpose" PC for the lounge - web surfing, etc - which should stop the other half hogging my main gaming PC so much! I'm also interested to see what sort of NAS performance I can get out of them; I know it's going to be ultimately limited by the USB performance, but if it's enough to stream HD content over a wired network then that'll be enough for me.