Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Raspberry Pi now available from Farnell and RS Components

The Raspberry Pi Foundation just announced that they are partnering with Farnell and RS Components to manufacture and distribute their much anticipated 'Raspberry Pi' computer.

This is a sensible move. Else the charity would have to built up an Amazon style logistics operation from scratch -- a huge distraction from their mission to provide affordable and hackable computers for teaching, experimentation and kids to play with. I just managed to get my order in to Farnell. It wasn't easy. Their system was creaking under the load! (at 06:00 in the morning!)

A quick summary of what a Raspberry Pi has to offer: it's an electronics board about the size of a credit card (no casing is provided right now). At its heart is an ARM based Broadcom BCM2835 with integrated CPU, GPU and RAM clocked at 700MHz (and a pretty beefy GPU by all accounts!),  256MB RAM, HDMI video output, SD card for storage, 2 x USB for peripherals and external storage, 1 x 100Mbps ethernet port, 3.5mm jack for audio.  And for hardware hackers, a general purpose IO port (with hardware support for UART, SPI, I2C etc).

Cost? Well it's supposed to be about $35. I got mine for €31.87 + VAT (ie about €35) from Farnell. But that includes shipping: so it's a fair price. (BTW: here is a direct link to the Raspberry Pi  Model B at Farnell).

I look forward to my Pi in the coming days!

Update (1 Mar 2012): Just got an email from Farnell. Despite pushing in my order 13 minutes after the announcement I still didn't make the first batch of 10,000 units. ETA for my Pi: end April 2012 ☹


1 comment:

PJ McKenna said...

Get a good SSD card! http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224352/Slow_smartphone_It_s_not_the_network_it_s_NAND_flash