16 ms·

Raspberri PI Release Announcement

543 points by aespinoza 15y ago

PKeeble 15y ago
The one thing you can say about incompetence is that its ignorant of its own condition. This does not bode well to the quality of the product itself, the lack of basic skills and forethought is frightening. After all that "we know what we are doing" talk I guess we can now point and laugh.
- javascriptlol 15y ago
  Yeesh, relax. Have you been injured by this? When they say they know what they're doing that's written from their perspective. It's not a declaration that they're going to live up to the expectations of every manchild who feels entitled to one of these devices.
- djhworld 15y ago
  They're a charity, they're not obliged to do anything for any one. They anticipated the launch issues so they brought on two distributors who have networks and infrastructure in place to distribute these sorts of products to customers all over the world. The problem is (and judging by their website design) these distributors probably don't get that much traffic on a day to day basis. Their products seem very niche. The distributors were warned and this is what happens. Don't blame the Raspberry Pi foundation for this.
solarmist 15y ago
Anyone have a link to the product pages for either of the suppliers? I can only find an "interest in" page.
- Zarathust 15y ago
  I wish, both sites appear down at the moment, probably due to heavy load
- aespinoza 15y ago
  All I get is: Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to uk.rs-online.com
- Ecio78 15y ago
  Check new tweets from Rpi on their account, maybe they'll give some hint http://twitter.com/raspberry_pi http://twitter.com/raspberry_pi (btw it looks like the Raspberry Pi release has "slashdotted" their sites)
- gmurphy 15y ago
  These are supposedly the links, though both sites are down. The third was just an "express an interest" page, as the supplier didn't yet have the appropriate page up. http://export.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://export.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-ras... http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?ICID=I-RASP-HPBLOF-0015&bespokepage=farnell/en_UK/promotions/raspberryPi.jsp http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?ICID=I-RASP-H... http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html
- rcxdude 15y ago
  I believe this is the one for farnell (there were two search results, this is the one which loaded): http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspber... however It seems to be a 'coming soon' product.
solarmist 15y ago
Both sites slashdotted in under a minute. Nice. No one can say they weren't warned.
- linker3000 15y ago
  It's reasonable to assume that even though both companies were warned that traffic to their sites would skyrocket they probably wouldn't have invested in any new infrastructure to just support one new product - probably more of a 'take note, grin and bear it' stance.
  - linker3000 15y ago
    Finally got one in the shopping cart at Farnell but checkout/registering a no-go.
  - solarmist 15y ago
    No, but there are a lot of other things they could've done. EC2 anyone?
    - linker3000 15y ago
      Farnell: THANK YOU FOR YOUR ORDER Goods Subtotal: £26.55 Basic Shipping: £0.00 VAT: £5.31 Total: £31.86 --->>> Further stock available in 30 days I'll believe it when I have the board in my hands though! Order confirmation email just come in: Description SBC, RASPBERRY PI, MODEL B Qty Ordered 1 Qty to Follow 1 Estimated Delivery W/C 12/03/2012 That's 12th March for our foreign friends -at least I hope its not 3rd Dec!!
      - linker3000 15y ago
        At work now (an electronics/tech company) - just been passed a message from our Farnell accounts manager; they're talking mid April for orders placed now. Looks like I may get my personal one (as above) first. Waiting for info from our RS accounts manager - RS seem a little less briefed about the whole thing - hmmm. Oh, yes - it bears repeating that RS are (and always have been) trade only and are very unlikely to take orders from individuals - for many, Farnell will be the better bet.
handelaar 15y ago
And after they spent the past couple of weeks cockily batting away concerns about how they'd handle the traffic load, too. "You're all talking like we don't know what we're doing" is the line I recall being used several times.
- learc83 15y ago
  They did seem to know what they were doing. They put up a temporary static site to handle the traffic. However, their suppliers, who are apparently fairly large companies, haven't been able to handle it. They said they warned them that the traffic would be enormous.
  - libria 15y ago
    Obviously people were only expressing concern because they were interested in purchasing reliably, not because they were worried about Rpi's server uptime numbers. It's a little trollish for them to blame their distributors and say "Our site is fine".
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      So what are you paying the distributors for then, if not for their infrastructure?
  - Devilboy 15y ago
    'We know what we're doing, we'll just palm it off to some random third party to take the heat!'
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisrhoden 15y ago
    Imagine that you're one of these companies and someone says, "We have 5,000 units for you. We expect that they will sell out in a few hours if you limit them to one per customer." Do you think that (a) they are being realistic about their customers or that (b) your servers will be unable to handle the load described by that scenario or (c) neither or (d) both?
scommab 15y ago
> We are no longer limited to batches of only 10k Raspberry Pis; the Raspberry Pi will now be being built to match demand. To me this is the key point. No need to fight through the rush tonight, there will enough to go around.
- aespinoza 15y ago
  That is true, for some reason I missed that from the site. Thanks for pointing that out...
- notatoad 15y ago
  If I'm reading it right, tonight will be the first batch of 10k, the 'later in 2012' release that we will be able to pre-order for will be from their licensed partners and not so limited in quantity. I could be wrong, I can't seem to access any website claiming to sell it.
  - slug 15y ago
    By later, they mean a month or so, not Q4 2012: "Starting in a month or so, you will be able to place batch orders with both Premier Farnell and RS Components for as many units as you want; you’ll also save some money on postage by doing this."
  - solarmist 15y ago
    You appear to be right. "We believe Farnell has sold out already. Blimey."
    - derda 15y ago
      Farnell had a product site up at launch time. When I first clicked "Add to Basket" I got a "Could not determine product stock, please try again" error. The second time just some AjaxError. And then the whole shopping cart crashed. Now they are serving a "Site unavailible" Page. I really wonder if they managed to sell all the stock before the page was DDOS'ed.
- nikcub 15y ago
RLG_RLG 15y ago
I'm sure they will be on ebay -- for $300
- joezydeco 15y ago
  Why downvote this guy? He's right. I'd wager that a non-insignificant % of the people scrambling to order want to get their hands on one to flip it on eBay. Watch what happens when they start shipping.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    And if someone needs one this week instead of waiting 2-3 weeks, then they're free to spend $300. Otherwise the seller is just playing to buyer's stupidity. Oh well.
    - joezydeco 15y ago
      I think it's going to be longer than 2-3 weeks to get one. Regardless, I don't see what the urgency is. If there's something you need to develop on an embedded ARM SoC, there are plenty of other more available (and less publicized) options.
    - RLG_RLG 15y ago
      predictions about the future are always uncertain
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  I'm expecting some Farnell group employees will get a nice "bonus"? Perhaps I'm too cynical? Edit: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700MHz-ARM-SBC-/170793413181?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item27c414aa3d http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700M... ; $999 on buy it now ... Edit 2: There's also this, http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700MHz-ARM-SBC-/251007504709?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item3a71369145 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700M..., which is interesting - must be against ebay policy to sell things you don't own?
deleted 15y ago
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- deleted 15y ago
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libria 15y ago
> The $25 Model A has been reworked to include 256MB of RAM – double what we were originally planning to offer So the extra $10 will only buy you an ethernet and spare USB port now; makes the $35 a harder sell (but not tonight, of course).
- Ecio78 15y ago
  I dont think so, if you need ethernet connection you need to buy an external lan/wifi card, spend at least a couple of bucks (3$ if you are lucky?)), lose one usb port (or use an usb hub), hope it will work in your OS, just to save some bucks (10-3 = 7$). For me, no way
  - moonchrome 15y ago
    However WLAN beats LAN, especially if I chose to build a small case and use this as a HTPC that I can use to watch.
    - Ecio78 15y ago
      is the wifi powerful enough for full HD streaming? I think the typical sub-10$ chinese WLAN card is just b/g
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - makomk 15y ago
        Eh, you seem to be able to get dirt-cheap USB b/g/n adapters too these days, though they're presumably 2.4 GHz only and who knows what the ARM Linux support is like for them.
    - waitwhat 15y ago
      Different people have different use cases. Apparently yours fits the Model B better.
noonespecial 15y ago
The production partnerships are encouraging news. Here's hoping my predictions on the Pi being more of a boutique/hobby venture that couldn't meet demand are wrong. I never thought they had much of a chance 10k at a time with weeks in between runs. Of course, their servers (at the suppliers) seem to be meeting their little digital Gods at the moment. They just went static at the org.
hinathan 15y ago
They've used a classic software engineering technique to solve a manufacturing problem — just add an additional abstraction layer. I'm thrilled they'll have more capacity but also a little sad I can't pick a few up at the Jameco will-call desk tomorrow.
solarmist 15y ago
From the tweets. "We believe Farnell has sold out already. Blimey."
- aespinoza 15y ago
  It is sad... I wasn't able to even get to see the site... let alone buy one.
  - MichaelStubbs 15y ago
    I was able to see RS and "register my interest", but apparently that doesn't equate to buying one. Then of course the Raspberry Pi team tweet that we're "on the wrong page" without even investigating the issue first. Most annoying.
    - tagawa 15y ago
      > without even investigating the issue first I think they've been a bit busy...
Jun8 15y ago
According to their tweet 4m ago, Farnell has already sold out! How people got on the site is a mystery.
egypturnash 15y ago
Man, I looked at Twitter, replied to someone, and went off to do something else like ONE MINUTE before the "hey you can buy the pi now" tweet. Twenty minutes later both the people ready to sell me one were totally swamped. Guess I don't get one from the first batch. Woe is me. Somehow I will survive! You know, as problems for a startup to have go, "demand for your product is so strong the servers selling it go down within twenty minutes" is a PRETTY GOOD PROBLEM.
- noonespecial 15y ago
  I was there right on the second. I didn't get one either. It was just server load lottery that determined the winners.
  - finnw 15y ago
    I think you would have to already have an account with one of the distributors to stand a chance. It's hard enough to get one page to load, but I would guess registering and placing an order would involve at least 5 clicks.
    - noonespecial 15y ago
      I've got one for RS. I was thrilled to see it listed. I thought I'd have an advantage. Nope.
- aespinoza 15y ago
  Hey I was also there at exactly 6:00 and the page just never loaded for me.
- youlost_thegame 15y ago
  Yes, dying from success is never the desired outcome, but at least they managed to send a first batch, which will be reviewed, will increase the hype, and hopefully give them a second chance to do things right and stock some more units
  - 15y ago
xahrepap 15y ago
Here's what I'm getting from Farnell: > Site unavailable > Our websites are currently unavailable whilst we perform a scheduled system upgrade. Scheduled? Yeah, if by scheduled they mean "unexpected but seriously needed" then I'll buy in to that. :)
- Ecio78 15y ago
  probably it's just a fixed message they have on their system (load balancers?) that pops up when the real webservers are meltin^H^H^H^H^H^H not responding :)
steeves 15y ago
Was anyone here able to order?
- donniezazen 15y ago
  I got one.
- djhworld 15y ago
  I've registered my interest with RS components but I doubt I'll be quick enough to get one when they go on sale
lancefisher 15y ago
Fulfillment by Amazon would be awesome for this. Free two-day shipping and the site wouldn't go down. Edit: Seriously, you send them a big box, and they mail out all the little boxes. Check it out: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm#!features-and-benefits http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....
- rmoriz 15y ago
  how would they handle RMA? RMA for such devboards are very common, even the TI folks had several issues with the recent BeagleBone...
  - Lewisham 15y ago
    Amazon deals with this too. [1] The TL;DR is that Amazon will take back units, and if they're marked as bad (presumably by the customer), Amazon holds on to them in their center, and can then ship them back to you. It's basically exactly the same as normal retail. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200386180#returns http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_r...
  - lancefisher 15y ago
    Amazon has a complete plan for returns, and handles them for you. "Returned unit is added to your inventory and designated "Unfulfillable." You can create a removal order to have the unit returned to you." You can read more here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200386180#returns http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... Of course there is a cost to having Amazon handle everything, but I'd happily pay a little more for a board I could order through Amazon.
- forza 15y ago
  While it would have been a good idea to distribute some of the devices from the US that wasn't the main problem. A common way to do a launch like this is: 1. Make people register with their e-mail adress. 2. Send order links with unique and expiring tokens in batches. 3. Process payments.
sowbug 15y ago
Probably no more than a curiosity, but http://cn.element14.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?id=2081185&Ntt=raspberry http://cn.element14.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?id=2081... (Farnell's China site) will show you the product page. Even Google Translate seems to be slashdotted, so I'm not going to try to get through that checkout process.
revelation 15y ago
What a tremendous failure. Why check with your distributors before going live? It's not even the traffic; RS never sold any and for the rare moment that you could get to Farnell, they were already (or always have been) out of stock from minute one.
- noonespecial 15y ago
  The tweets from the foundation make it look more like Farnell actually took about 10 minutes to sell what they had. Nobody's quite sure whats up with RS yet.
  - revelation 15y ago
    Then I blame their fucked up shop system with yet another site for every other region? All I can say is that one minute after launch, the product page on Farnell was showing "out of stock". After that, the site never loaded again. Apparently the only way you could actually get one is through some back of the woods partner site of them in Australia. Hooray.
    - xelfer 15y ago
      I couldn't even find it on the Australian site. I got it into a shopping cart on the UK one, but it died while trying to create my account.
      - bigiain 15y ago
        I managed to get a confirmation for an order of two through the Australian Element14 site - it took a dozen or so reloads to get the product into the cart, then almost an hour to get through the payment process (I was already registered from previous purchases).
        finnw 15y ago
        According to the blog at raspberrypi.org (currently offline) they are limiting orders to 1 per customer. So it will be interesting to see if this order goes through.
endlessvoid94 15y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't know what Raspberri PI is. The site literally doesn't tell me anything about the actual product. I see an image of an arduino-like board -- is that it? Not being snotty or anything, I just literally can't find any information on the site.
- noonespecial 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi There's usually more at their site, they went static about a half hour ago because of the load on their servers.
waitwhat 15y ago
People might have some luck with their telephone ordering RS Online: +44 8457 201201 Farnell: +44 8447 111111 (Although I have been on hold with RS for a while now...)
- corin_ 15y ago
  01536 201201 a cheaper number for RS - but yeah, the wait could be a while..
- waitwhat 15y ago
  After 25 minutes on hold with RS, I spoke to an agent. She was (understandably) a bit flustered, so this might not be correct, but what I gathered was: * She couldn't take an order * They weren't going to be able to take an order today * What I should be doing is "registering an interest" online when the website comes back up * Noone had ordered anything today, although a few had managed to register an interest before the website melted
  - corin_ 15y ago
    The one I just spoke to said they are waiting for managers to come in to sort out what's going on, so far they don't even have stock numbers and all they know about this product is what's shown on their own website.
jrmg 15y ago
Curious as to why they chose 6AM UK time to launch. I wonder if RS or Farnell tech staff are actually at work ready to handle the server problems?
- steeves 15y ago
  Maximize the amount of publicity throughout the day perhaps?
- semisight 15y ago
  The first batch was limited to 10K units. Their logic was probably that the most devoted fans would take the time to get up early, and the rest would buy from the subsequent batches.
w-ll 15y ago
It seams neither of their distributors where shipping these to the US?
TomAnthony 15y ago
RS on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/rselectronics https://twitter.com/#!/rselectronics They tweeted at 6am to link to the page, then not since. Farnell on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/farnellnews https://twitter.com/#!/farnellnews They at least tweeted at 6.30 to say they are trying to fix the problems.
TomAnthony 15y ago
Phoned RS and the hold message is great: "But you don't have to wait. With our world class system you can be confident you can get what you want when want it. Did you know while you listened to this message you could have placed your order online."
switz 15y ago
What's the prices in USD (I'm seeing $50.45 from Farnell)? Has anyone from the US officially ordered one? Shipping?
waitwhat 15y ago
The Farnell product page came up briefly for me: http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspber... (but the servers are still melting, so the buy links weren't working)
flannell 15y ago
Just got a broken CSS site, now says; http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspber... Availability: Awaiting Delivery ... so back to work...
rjsamson 15y ago
It looks like the RS site is coming back online - but their Raspberry Pi product page still only says "register to express an interest"...
rjsamson 15y ago
The hard link that RS had given out on their twitter was here: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberrypi http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberry... if anyone wants to keep trying...
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  That gives me, in the UK, "Register here to express an interest in Raspberry Pi". Which I did. Farnell then tell you: "By providing your contact details you are agreeing for your details to be used for marketing purposes by companies within the Premier Farnell Group." Which I find rather off-putting.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    And since they are, in theory, business to business you don't get the already weak UK legal spam protection.
locusm 15y ago
I managed to buy one in Australia, I had it in my cart at about 4:10PM, took till 2 mins ago(5:08PM) to finish checkout. No word if its a backorder or not...
- locusm 15y ago
  Also, weird that Farnell had 2 product pages, one for $38AUD, another for $50 - both were listed as model B.
tomdeakin 15y ago
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120228006472/en/RS-Components-Announces-Launch-Raspberry-Pi-35 http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120228006472/en/RS-C... That's from RS's Twitter feed. Not exactly the praises I'd sing right now.
TomAnthony 15y ago
RS are apparently refusing to sell to private people - business orders only according to several people on Twitter who got through on the phone. Nice job.
- __alexs 15y ago
  They are a trade supplier, usually you can just invent a company name for the purposes of the order though. They don't check your VAT registration or anything.
akavel 15y ago
On one hand, old wisdom creeps in: "if you really want something done well, do it yourself". But on the other hand, if they happened to fail selling at raspberrypi.com, everyone and his dog would be accusing them of hubris and suggesting they should have relied on "verified distributors". The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it would probably hit some random guys and not anyone really responsible for the incompetency. Edit: I think I would feel some evil (bad, bad me!) satisfaction if R-Pi Foundation would punish the distro corps by not letting them distribute any further batches of R-Pi for as long as possible. But again, that would probably hurt most the common employees, not the management.
- waitwhat 15y ago
  My guess is that the current batch will stay exclusive to the current distributors, but this mess will encourage the Foundation to add new distributors for all future product. So the distributors will have some consequences: a smaller share of future orders.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they might have seen this coming. It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities. Arguably what Raspberry Pi could/should have done was use Arduino's model of having licensed manufacturers and they could have sat in front of it, and, as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, just ship giant boxes to Amazon to actually do all the dirty work. This would have covered the US, Europe and Japan (if you ship to all Amazon's fulfillment centers), which would have been plenty I think.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    They're both part of large international companies. This first shipment is disappointing to many people. Hopefully crashing the servers so hard will give both these distributors some idea of what the demand is, and they'll get some large production runs going, and shift some stock to international distribution partners. > RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities. RS is where you go when you have an account and need small amounts of components on a regular basis. Buying large quantities of components results in a very frustrating experience. See, for example, the way they sell surface mount components. Buy qty 500 of 0805 SM resistors and Farnell will send you a strip of 500 while RS will sell you 50 little strips of 10 per strip. Or the way that individual parts are bagged.
X-Istence 15y ago
The electronics suppliers are not used to this kind of traffic. I remember Ti's website grounding to a halt when I was first in college when they released a new kit for free, and in the past when they have done coupons for half off certain high value items. Interesting side note, Ti for its free samples uses Digikey to process them (same address, same exact boxes, packaging and onetime when I ordered a free sample I got Digikey note rather than a Ti note :P) The traffic for those websites generally is very low, I can't imagine that they are ready for anything to what they are seeing right now. I do wish they had also launched with Digikey my favourite electronic parts distributor. Their shipping is always top notch and their service is absolutely fantastic.
- yardie 15y ago
  That wasn't the case for my last order from TI. I ordered there EZ430 launchpad kits and according to the shipping label it came from a TI office in malaysia. I was originally going to go through Digikey but they wanted 5x ($20 instead of $4) the price.
  - X-Istence 15y ago
    You purchased them from TI. I was referring to their samples. All the stuff I've purchased from TI has indeed been shipped directly from TI itself and not through Digikey.
    - ssmall 15y ago
      If I remember right, last time I got samples from TI they shipped from them and not from digikey. Its been a little bit. Location might play in to it some, I live about 15 min away from their headquarters.
      - X-Istence 15y ago
        That is entirely possible, but with over 20+ sample shipments over a year while living in Phoenix I only received samples shipped from Digikeys facilities.
DanBC 15y ago
BBC Radio Four's "Today" programme are talking about Raspberry PI right now. They haven't mentioned server problems yet, or the fact that it's sold out already. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm) (7:45am Wednesday 29th Feb)
- noonespecial 15y ago
  7:51: Now they have. Right after thought of the day. With a laugh.
- Someone 15y ago
  It made it to television, too, fove minutes ago, in the BBC News.
polshaw 15y ago
I can't say I can hold zero blame for the rPi gang on this clusterfuck.. offloading the task was never going to help, it should have been obvious RS/Farnell were not ready- Amazon were the only retailer that could have handled it. But I don't see why they couldn't have handled the orders themselves (Amazon again?). Apparently someone from RS sales has now said they aren't selling any until the end of the week! How insanely disorganised. And 10K was also clearly never going to be close-- there were even far more forum members than this. I wouldn't be so grumpy if they didn't make me get up at 6AM for this crap.
- Ecio78 15y ago
  "They’ll be manufacturing and distributing the devices on behalf of the Raspberry Pi Foundation" I dont think Amazon is in the business of manufactoring hardware for others.
  - noonespecial 15y ago
    Yes, but this was the launch being done with boards that were already built in China. What they really wanted to have happen today was to get the 10,000 units into the hands of their fans as quickly and painlessly as possible, get a polite apology to those who didn't get one, and then hit the PR bell with their big brass "sold them all in 10 minutes" hammer. "Nobody knows what the hell happened but I didn't get one" is probably not the takeaway they were hoping for on launch day.
    - Lewisham 15y ago
      Yeah, not getting one is one thing. The probably inevitable emails of "Yeah, you know we charged your credit card and said we'd ship you a Raspberry Pi... well, we're not... please wait 4-8 weeks" are far, far worse.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- ejenkinsiii 15y ago
  Thank you for this clarification, and nicely said would've been nice to get an update a few hours ago stating they weren't taking U.S sales, same thing happen for the eBay auction, forgive me HN just needed to vent
ukdm 15y ago
FYI, if you order through Farnell, the total comes to £31.86 with free delivery. The device is actually £26.55 but then there's VAT to add in the UK.
ww520 15y ago
What kind of casing is there for holding the board? It would nice to have a case, like the Marvell wallplug computer.
marklittlewood 15y ago
I believe in eating your own dog food but it's fine if @Raspberry_Pi use someone else's tech for their ecommerce.
mrpippy 15y ago
Everyone in the US: The Raspberry Pi is now listed on Newark/element14 (Farnell's US site): http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/dp/83T1943 http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/dp/83T1943 It's $35, although there's also a 30 day lead time and a $20 handling fee (because it's shipping directly from the UK).
- sitharus 15y ago
  Ouch, it's less than that in NZ from element14!
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  That's a bit silly - can't they send a big box full to the US and use a US distributor (I'm in the UK FWIW).
- ryan-c 15y ago
  I placed an order this morning and just got an email with an expected ship date of May 20th.
Kaostricks 15y ago
Waiting for this.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
linker3000 15y ago
Gosh - this person on ebay ships in 5-6 days and has already sold 28. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290677406685 http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290... /Ya think?
- robinduckett 15y ago
  I don't know how he can get away with this. To have that many he must have a deal with RS - the 5 - 6 day shipping date must be first class after he receives however many he's ordered through RS as a sub-distributer otherwise this goes against the 1 per person completely.
  - linker3000 15y ago
    What he says he has, and what he has in reality are possibly quite different. He's sold 28 - not sure how many have been delivered Edit: From the RasPi Twitter feed - they said it... @Raspberry_Pi EVERYONE! Stop posting that ebay item!. He is a scammer and getting more sales from here. Pic posted is the Alpha proto board
- SteveMoody73 15y ago
  Raspberry Pi are recommending that people don't buy them from e-bay. https://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174789853500813312 https://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/17478985350081331...
- jakemcgraw 15y ago
  Hit the "Report This Item" link
tnajdek 15y ago
I've just ordered one over the phone, Farnell adds a surcharge so the grand total is a little over £36. Surprisingly no wait time on the phone whatsoever! The number is 08447111111.
- corford 15y ago
  I just called them on that number and was told they've sold out, next batch available in 4 to 5 weeks. Bummer :(
zvrba 15y ago
Maybe I'm clueless, but why would you order one if you already have a PC?
- DanBC 15y ago
  Because you want a teeny tiny Arm development board? Because you want to make a fanless media server? Because you want to learn programming and your elder brother is hogging the PC surfing for whatever teenage boys surf for?
  - zvrba 15y ago
    So it's a minicomputer without the disk, keyboard, mouse, screen, and speakers, which quickly adds up to $250 with cheapest components if you want to use it as a general-purpose computer. At the same time, it runs linux and the same linux distro runs also in qemu, so you can do most of the develompent without actual hardware. So where's the rush, why does everybody have to get it right now?
    - outworlder 15y ago
      Really, can't you think of any use for a powerful, small, dirt cheap ARM computer?
    - DanBC 15y ago
      I'm not sure why there's such a rush. It's a really neat device. I haven't been excited by a gadget for a few years, and this is quite exciting. But I'm happy to wait for some months before I get one. I guess there's some kudos or cachet or whatnot tied up with owning one of the first batch; with being one of the first 10,000 people to have blogs up about programming the device.
    - eupharis 15y ago
      No. $250 is ridiculous, even for buying everything new. I just spent 2 minutes googling: Amazon Class Class 10 8 GB SD Card: $9 Best Buy 20" LCD: $90 Keyboard: $15 Mouse: $7.54 Speakers: $10.54 Total: $132.08 If you go to your local thriftstore, you could get all of these for <$50. Not sure if you have ever been a poor kid or not, but take it from me, this computer WILL bring computing to kids who would not otherwise have access.
illumen 15y ago
Competition in the computer education space is nice. OLPC comes with: screen, case, power supply, battery, cam, Source Code, wifi, training, & doesn't require £400 TV that can run code already.
suckerpunch 15y ago
Man... I currently work in the same company as Ian Livingstone and he promised a couple of us some boards to use in our next project. I hope he comes through. I started off on the Beeb and the ZX Spectrum and it's be great to come full circle 30 years later :D
krelian 15y ago
I'll admit that I haven't been following this very closely, what makes this product this craze worthy compared to something like the Arduino?
- listic 15y ago
  The fact that it's a personal computer, probably.
- semanticist 15y ago
  It's not really directly comparable to an Arduino - it's a full-blown ARM Linux computer, with HDMI, ethernet, and a couple of orders of magnitude more RAM than an Arduino. It also has some limited IO available, if you're prepared to solder headers onto the board. An Arduino is basically a whole bunch of IO, including PWM output and analogue input, that you can wrap up with some glue logic or send straight to a computer. If you want to interface with a range of sensors/motors in a self-contained unit, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino actually make a good combination - you can write your logic code in whatever language you like in a Linux environment, and use the Arduino to interface it with the real world.
  - glogla 15y ago
    Yes, the combination would be interesting. Lot of projects in our new media/intermedia/interactive art lab use Arduino for interfacing with buttons, ultrasound sensor, pressure sensors and similar gizmos, while using normal PC for logic or video playback on projectors or something. Raspberry is capable enough for that (though I'm not sure the artists would be happy hacking it in python instead of Processing ;) ), pc's are big and ugly and having two miniature computers doing the whole thing would be really cool. It would also make sense for (noncritical) monitoring systems, where Arduino can interface with pretty much anything, and raspberry could either display things on monitors, or make a web page for remote monitoring, no problem. (you add ethernet to Arduino and run web server on it, sure, but I would never do something that horrible to the little ATmega.)
    - semanticist 15y ago
fmstephe 15y ago
This reaction is really surprising to me. The Raspberry Pi charity was set up in order to produce a product that could be used as an education tool. They have managed a spectacular feat, that has been 6 years in the making. This is a very exciting development but not just from a technical point of view. The Raspberry Pi represents the idea that computers are interesting to us intrinsically, that there is real value in providing a platform that allows for the development and satisfaction of a crucial intellectual curiosity. The true value of the Raspberry Pi will not be found in our mailboxes in the next few months. It will be in the possibility that the next generation will have something to hack on that prioritises learning and discovery over walled gardens. Sorry for the preachy tone (it's not intended), I am sure that most people feel the same way (or something similar), but it feels like we have lost some perspective while getting up at 6am to order some electronics over the internet. This is a great day. (I have a son and the Raspberry Pi feels like the most exciting project I have seen to date)
- PKeeble 15y ago
  Education might be the stated aim of the project but its not the limit of the device. This is a device similar to an Arduino except for the fact its got HDMI, USB, is about 700 times faster and in the order of 256 million times more RAM and its only 25% more expensive. Its a hardware hackers delight and a desktop capable computer. It is also a very real competitor for nettops which sell in the millions at a price point 5-10x higher than this. It may very well be used by students to code, but that will be a niche it falls into right behind becoming the cheapest desktop capable computer ever built that isn't locked down. This could very well start a revolution in portable desktop computers that are really cheap. I personally think it is an exciting device but let down by the narrow vision of its application.
  - fmstephe 15y ago
    I agree with everything you have said about the potential of the Raspberry Pi. My surprise was at the tone of the reaction on this thread. That these people have spent this long on such a worthy project and have produced something that is probably truly exceptional. We should be grateful and excited. I don't think it has been let down at all. We will all get one, just maybe not immediately.
unwind 15y ago
Too late to have someone change the typo in the product's name in the title? It ends with a 'Y', not an 'I'. Aaargh.
- obtu 15y ago
  Capitalisation too: Raspberry Pi
pavlov 15y ago
I got an order in this morning at Farnell Finland, and just received an order confirmation by email. The delivery date is quoted as "week 16", which is mid-April. Oh well.
adaml_623 15y ago
Given the large amount of worry on this thread about getting one of the first 10000 I'm really looking forwards to seeing hundreds of blog posts and stories about people doing really interesting thing with their hard-fought purchases. I'm only being half sarcastic. I really would like to see people do cool things with these. And I will be disappointed if it turns out that 9500 of them end up in a drawer after the first weekend.
- freehunter 15y ago
  I would fear more that 9500 of them end up on eBay at $200 per unit until the next batch comes along. I really don't like people profiting from squatting.
  - ajays 15y ago
    Then the eBay buyers would post projects. Eventually the units (or most of them) will end up in the hands of a hacker, regardless of the route taken to get there.
    - gaius 15y ago
      They're not supposed to end up in the hands of hackers for $200+. They're supposed to end up in the hands of kids for $35.
      - learc83 15y ago
        This first run is not the educational release. These are specifically for hackers. The educational release will be later this year, and will include cases, power supplies, and an OS for the same price. This release is lacking all those. This early release is for hackers to play with, develop projects, and write tutorials, so that there is an ecosystem already in place for the educational release.
        moonchrome 15y ago
        >This early release is for hackers to play with, develop projects, and write tutorials, so that there is an ecosystem already in place for the educational release. A shame that the GPU specs aren't open, I would love to get in to GPU driver development with something like this.
rmk2 15y ago
I am really disappointed about their choice of distributors. Neither Farnell's nor RS Components subsidiaries in Germany and Austria ship to private individuals, you have to be a corporate buyer in order to be able to order from them. And since they "have" local subsidiaries, the "international" sites of both companies don't ship to either country. In short: in Germany or Austria, you cannot buy the Raspberry Pi unless you go through an intermediary. This seems to be a really bad choice for a platform aimed at education. And judging by the Twitter comments, at least (potential) customers in Sweden and the Netherlands have the same problem. http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174752572194824192 http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174752572194824192 http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174779094783897600 http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174779094783897600 I guess what bothers me is how they don't seem to care too much about not being buyable by private entities in a number of European countries, or how they at least didn't bother to check up-front... Still, I hope I can get one of the next batches somehow
- maayank 15y ago
  You can use a forwarding service like http://www.ukpostbox.com http://www.ukpostbox.com
  - rmk2 15y ago
    I know that there are ways. There is apparently also an intermediary i Austria. I'll have a look at that forwarding site. I just wanted to point that out, since it gets drowned a bit on Twitter and I didn't see much posted about it.
- ArnoVanLumig 15y ago
  Private entities can place an order at the Dutch Farnell by email if the total sum is over 50 euros. See for instance [1]. I could not find similar regulations at the German Farnell site. [1] http://nl.farnell.com/images/nl_NL/pdf/Particulier_voorwaarden.doc http://nl.farnell.com/images/nl_NL/pdf/Particulier_voorwaard...
- willyt 15y ago
  Maybe its different here, but I've been ordering from RS in the uk for years as a private entity. The site is targeted at B2B and makes it seem like you have to be a company but actually you don't really. I think I just put in n/a or something for company name on the registration page. You don't have to have a trade account, they take credit cards. Orders below £50 you pay £5 for delivery.
napierzaza 15y ago
What better way to teach young people about the current computing landscape. Make a product based on a closed-source proprietary chip-set, distribute through middle men that deal only with other companies. Hope you like working with the Pi in class, you can't buy one for yourself or get to the meat of the system without an NDA. If you were interested in that...
yahelc 15y ago
I'm a little peeved. I signed up for the email notifications and did the confirmation and everything, and never got the email saying they were opening up for orders. :-/
cicero 15y ago
This is a very inexpensive product produced by a charity. How can they afford what it would take for a launch like this to run flawlessly? I work for a non-profit that does all it can to provide a high quality service at a below market price, so I have sympathy for these guys. If you want first class service from day one, expect to pay a little more than $35. Even Apple with their high profit margins has had difficulty with launches for high demand products.
- djhworld 15y ago
  Yeah the amount of moaning is really shocking, I'm disappointed too but I'll be able to get a R-PI eventually. Patience is a virtue
  - ssmall 15y ago
    With things like this I'd rather wait for the 2nd or 3rd run anyways. They are a small group who are doing this on a shoestring budget for a price point with a tiny profit margin and targeting a highly technical audience; I won't be shocked if there are some small hardware bugs that make it past QA in the first run. Its worth the waiting a little bit to let them iron all that out.
    - alexchamberlain 15y ago
      I was thinking about this, but given they've got an OS running, it is good enough for £20, and I'll replace it when necessary.
      - ssmall 15y ago
        You can have an OS running and not have it 100% stable for long term with small latent bugs. I've actually got a prototype board I'm working on right now that runs Linux just fine but will lock up and need to be rebooted every few days. But as you said, for 20 quid who cares?
- fmstephe 15y ago
joejohnson 15y ago
What cool plans do people have for these if they can get their hands on one?
- finnw 15y ago
  Probably not quite what the designers intended, but... I plan to put one in an aluminium box with some SRAM and an anti-tamper switch, store keys in the SRAM and use it to back up TrueCrypted thumb drives. Should be more secure than mounting them on an internet-connected PC just to back them up.
donohoe 15y ago
What do people plan to use their Raspberry PI for? Given the nature of HN I'm intrigued to see what unique and innovate ideas people here may have...
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  It is capable of doing 1080p decoding. I no longer need a Blu-ray player, Boxee box, Roku box, anything. I have an HDTV, I plug this into it with XBMC installed. Boom. I can stream anything from anywhere. It's also AirPlay enabled. Any TV just became a very smart TV for $35. If you're not familiar with XBMC, prepare to have your mind blown.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    Not having Wifi kills this option for me personally.
    - slash-dot 15y ago
      Coudn't you get wifi via usb?
    - jackolas 15y ago
      stick a dongle on it.
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      Really? I'm fortunate that my parents recently built a house and wired ethernet everywhere (I'm tired of helping my dad try to configure transcoding servers to stream to broken DLNA implementations that vary between the 3 different Samsung LCDs he bought within 3 months) and I'll be doing the same.
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      Buy a WRT54gl, put dd-wrt on it, set it up as a client-bridge, now you can network your xbox, HTPC, PS3, etc. easily.
ef4 15y ago
A recurring theme in these comments has been the hassles of doing things like fulfillment (can't use Amazon) and payment-processing (can't use Kickstarter) across national borders. If you want to build the killer app for the 21st century, figure out how to help people route money and physical objects globally, with all these obnoxious borders abstracted away. ;-)
slash-dot 15y ago
What's the max resolution on the gpu?
jacquesm 15y ago
I love it how people are pissing on this as though it is a failure. Really, unbelievable. Here is a group of dedicated guys and girls that work their asses off to produce a $25 computer with more punch than you'd ever think possible for that amount of money. Not only do they deliver, they are sold out in absolute record time with the sites simply collapsing under the load. I'd chalk this one up as a success, definitely not a failure and I fully expect the second (and subsequent) runs of the RaspberryPi to have a similar effect. Kudos to Eben, Liz and the rest of the team, you guys really rock and I hope that you won't let the sourpusses ruin your fantastic day for you. I've watched the RaspberryPi saga closely from day 1 and I'm very very happy to see it come to fruit ;)
- lsllc 15y ago
  Agreed! The $25 price point is incredible, and selling 10K units in 10 mins is a runaway success! I placed my order and will happily to wait until April, until then I will continue my project(s) working on a BeagleBone ($89) and a PandaBoard ($149).
  - digispaghetti 15y ago
    I feel the same way (although I was a little grumpy at first, but it was 6am and I hadn't had a coffee yet!)
- asb 15y ago
  Not to forget: they all have day jobs. People have been worrying for ages about how Raspberry Pi will deal with the demand and get out of a process of making batches, having them sell out instantly and then using that capital to build the next batch. Eben talks about why the RS and Farnell partnership is a big deal and will help to solve that problem in this video interview: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/02/28/2347222/raspberry-pi-now-has-distributors----and-will-soon-have-boards-for-all-video http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/02/28/2347222/raspberr...
  - jacquesm 15y ago
    Indeed. Just to put into perspective what a huge event this launch was: for a short while (about 10 minutes) the RasberryPi outsold the iPhone 4:1. Of course, Apple moves 250 iphones per minute all the time but there was absolutely no way that a small outfit like this could have anticipated and/or met this insane surge of demand. I sure hope it validates the concept to everybody that was still doubting and I hope that we'll soon be able to mark the 100K, 1M and up milestones of units sold.
mrbill 15y ago
Ordered two from Newark (I'm in the US); the order confirmation email has an Expected Ship Date of 5/10/12. I've got a BeagleBoard C2 and a BeagleBone to play with until then...
RobertKohr 15y ago
This all seems like a pricing problem. If you don't have enough product to meet demand, you charge more. I guess in the end it is worth it though. The amount of hype that surrounds selling out is great.
- eavc 15y ago
  But in this case, the price-point is highly sensitive. The reason there is so much demand is because it is insanely cheap. It's exciting because of what it signals, and even modestly raising the price changes the narrative.
- teraflop 15y ago
  If your goal is to maximize profit, sure. But Raspberry Pi is a registered non-profit organization.

543 points by aespinoza 15y ago

The one thing you can say about incompetence is that its ignorant of its own condition. This does not bode well to the quality of the product itself, the lack of basic skills and forethought is frightening. After all that "we know what we are doing" talk I guess we can now point and laugh.

javascriptlol 15y ago
Yeesh, relax. Have you been injured by this? When they say they know what they're doing that's written from their perspective. It's not a declaration that they're going to live up to the expectations of every manchild who feels entitled to one of these devices.
djhworld 15y ago
They're a charity, they're not obliged to do anything for any one. They anticipated the launch issues so they brought on two distributors who have networks and infrastructure in place to distribute these sorts of products to customers all over the world. The problem is (and judging by their website design) these distributors probably don't get that much traffic on a day to day basis. Their products seem very niche. The distributors were warned and this is what happens. Don't blame the Raspberry Pi foundation for this.

solarmist 15y ago

Anyone have a link to the product pages for either of the suppliers? I can only find an "interest in" page.

Zarathust 15y ago
I wish, both sites appear down at the moment, probably due to heavy load
aespinoza 15y ago
All I get is: Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to uk.rs-online.com
Ecio78 15y ago
Check new tweets from Rpi on their account, maybe they'll give some hint http://twitter.com/raspberry_pi http://twitter.com/raspberry_pi (btw it looks like the Raspberry Pi release has "slashdotted" their sites)
gmurphy 15y ago
These are supposedly the links, though both sites are down. The third was just an "express an interest" page, as the supplier didn't yet have the appropriate page up. http://export.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://export.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-ras... http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?ICID=I-RASP-HPBLOF-0015&bespokepage=farnell/en_UK/promotions/raspberryPi.jsp http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/bespoke/bespoke7.jsp?ICID=I-RASP-H... http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html
rcxdude 15y ago
I believe this is the one for farnell (there were two search results, this is the one which loaded): http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspber... however It seems to be a 'coming soon' product.

solarmist 15y ago

Both sites slashdotted in under a minute. Nice. No one can say they weren't warned.

linker3000 15y ago
It's reasonable to assume that even though both companies were warned that traffic to their sites would skyrocket they probably wouldn't have invested in any new infrastructure to just support one new product - probably more of a 'take note, grin and bear it' stance.
- linker3000 15y ago
  Finally got one in the shopping cart at Farnell but checkout/registering a no-go.
- solarmist 15y ago
  No, but there are a lot of other things they could've done. EC2 anyone?
  - linker3000 15y ago
    Farnell: THANK YOU FOR YOUR ORDER Goods Subtotal: £26.55 Basic Shipping: £0.00 VAT: £5.31 Total: £31.86 --->>> Further stock available in 30 days I'll believe it when I have the board in my hands though! Order confirmation email just come in: Description SBC, RASPBERRY PI, MODEL B Qty Ordered 1 Qty to Follow 1 Estimated Delivery W/C 12/03/2012 That's 12th March for our foreign friends -at least I hope its not 3rd Dec!!
    - linker3000 15y ago
      At work now (an electronics/tech company) - just been passed a message from our Farnell accounts manager; they're talking mid April for orders placed now. Looks like I may get my personal one (as above) first. Waiting for info from our RS accounts manager - RS seem a little less briefed about the whole thing - hmmm. Oh, yes - it bears repeating that RS are (and always have been) trade only and are very unlikely to take orders from individuals - for many, Farnell will be the better bet.

handelaar 15y ago

And after they spent the past couple of weeks cockily batting away concerns about how they'd handle the traffic load, too. "You're all talking like we don't know what we're doing" is the line I recall being used several times.

learc83 15y ago
They did seem to know what they were doing. They put up a temporary static site to handle the traffic. However, their suppliers, who are apparently fairly large companies, haven't been able to handle it. They said they warned them that the traffic would be enormous.
- libria 15y ago
  Obviously people were only expressing concern because they were interested in purchasing reliably, not because they were worried about Rpi's server uptime numbers. It's a little trollish for them to blame their distributors and say "Our site is fine".
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    So what are you paying the distributors for then, if not for their infrastructure?
- Devilboy 15y ago
  'We know what we're doing, we'll just palm it off to some random third party to take the heat!'
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisrhoden 15y ago
  Imagine that you're one of these companies and someone says, "We have 5,000 units for you. We expect that they will sell out in a few hours if you limit them to one per customer." Do you think that (a) they are being realistic about their customers or that (b) your servers will be unable to handle the load described by that scenario or (c) neither or (d) both?

scommab 15y ago

> We are no longer limited to batches of only 10k Raspberry Pis; the Raspberry Pi will now be being built to match demand. To me this is the key point. No need to fight through the rush tonight, there will enough to go around.

aespinoza 15y ago
That is true, for some reason I missed that from the site. Thanks for pointing that out...
notatoad 15y ago
If I'm reading it right, tonight will be the first batch of 10k, the 'later in 2012' release that we will be able to pre-order for will be from their licensed partners and not so limited in quantity. I could be wrong, I can't seem to access any website claiming to sell it.
- slug 15y ago
  By later, they mean a month or so, not Q4 2012: "Starting in a month or so, you will be able to place batch orders with both Premier Farnell and RS Components for as many units as you want; you’ll also save some money on postage by doing this."
- solarmist 15y ago
  You appear to be right. "We believe Farnell has sold out already. Blimey."
  - derda 15y ago
    Farnell had a product site up at launch time. When I first clicked "Add to Basket" I got a "Could not determine product stock, please try again" error. The second time just some AjaxError. And then the whole shopping cart crashed. Now they are serving a "Site unavailible" Page. I really wonder if they managed to sell all the stock before the page was DDOS'ed.
nikcub 15y ago

RLG_RLG 15y ago

I'm sure they will be on ebay -- for $300

joezydeco 15y ago
Why downvote this guy? He's right. I'd wager that a non-insignificant % of the people scrambling to order want to get their hands on one to flip it on eBay. Watch what happens when they start shipping.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  And if someone needs one this week instead of waiting 2-3 weeks, then they're free to spend $300. Otherwise the seller is just playing to buyer's stupidity. Oh well.
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    I think it's going to be longer than 2-3 weeks to get one. Regardless, I don't see what the urgency is. If there's something you need to develop on an embedded ARM SoC, there are plenty of other more available (and less publicized) options.
  - RLG_RLG 15y ago
    predictions about the future are always uncertain
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
I'm expecting some Farnell group employees will get a nice "bonus"? Perhaps I'm too cynical? Edit: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700MHz-ARM-SBC-/170793413181?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item27c414aa3d http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700M... ; $999 on buy it now ... Edit 2: There's also this, http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700MHz-ARM-SBC-/251007504709?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item3a71369145 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-Ethernet-700M..., which is interesting - must be against ebay policy to sell things you don't own?

deleted 15y ago

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deleted 15y ago
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libria 15y ago

> The $25 Model A has been reworked to include 256MB of RAM – double what we were originally planning to offer So the extra $10 will only buy you an ethernet and spare USB port now; makes the $35 a harder sell (but not tonight, of course).

Ecio78 15y ago
I dont think so, if you need ethernet connection you need to buy an external lan/wifi card, spend at least a couple of bucks (3$ if you are lucky?)), lose one usb port (or use an usb hub), hope it will work in your OS, just to save some bucks (10-3 = 7$). For me, no way
- moonchrome 15y ago
  However WLAN beats LAN, especially if I chose to build a small case and use this as a HTPC that I can use to watch.
  - Ecio78 15y ago
    is the wifi powerful enough for full HD streaming? I think the typical sub-10$ chinese WLAN card is just b/g
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - makomk 15y ago
      Eh, you seem to be able to get dirt-cheap USB b/g/n adapters too these days, though they're presumably 2.4 GHz only and who knows what the ARM Linux support is like for them.
  - waitwhat 15y ago
    Different people have different use cases. Apparently yours fits the Model B better.

noonespecial 15y ago

The production partnerships are encouraging news. Here's hoping my predictions on the Pi being more of a boutique/hobby venture that couldn't meet demand are wrong. I never thought they had much of a chance 10k at a time with weeks in between runs. Of course, their servers (at the suppliers) seem to be meeting their little digital Gods at the moment. They just went static at the org.

hinathan 15y ago

They've used a classic software engineering technique to solve a manufacturing problem — just add an additional abstraction layer. I'm thrilled they'll have more capacity but also a little sad I can't pick a few up at the Jameco will-call desk tomorrow.

solarmist 15y ago

From the tweets. "We believe Farnell has sold out already. Blimey."

aespinoza 15y ago
It is sad... I wasn't able to even get to see the site... let alone buy one.
- MichaelStubbs 15y ago
  I was able to see RS and "register my interest", but apparently that doesn't equate to buying one. Then of course the Raspberry Pi team tweet that we're "on the wrong page" without even investigating the issue first. Most annoying.
  - tagawa 15y ago
    > without even investigating the issue first I think they've been a bit busy...

Jun8 15y ago

According to their tweet 4m ago, Farnell has already sold out! How people got on the site is a mystery.

egypturnash 15y ago

Man, I looked at Twitter, replied to someone, and went off to do something else like ONE MINUTE before the "hey you can buy the pi now" tweet. Twenty minutes later both the people ready to sell me one were totally swamped. Guess I don't get one from the first batch. Woe is me. Somehow I will survive! You know, as problems for a startup to have go, "demand for your product is so strong the servers selling it go down within twenty minutes" is a PRETTY GOOD PROBLEM.

noonespecial 15y ago
I was there right on the second. I didn't get one either. It was just server load lottery that determined the winners.
- finnw 15y ago
  I think you would have to already have an account with one of the distributors to stand a chance. It's hard enough to get one page to load, but I would guess registering and placing an order would involve at least 5 clicks.
  - noonespecial 15y ago
    I've got one for RS. I was thrilled to see it listed. I thought I'd have an advantage. Nope.
aespinoza 15y ago
Hey I was also there at exactly 6:00 and the page just never loaded for me.
youlost_thegame 15y ago
Yes, dying from success is never the desired outcome, but at least they managed to send a first batch, which will be reviewed, will increase the hype, and hopefully give them a second chance to do things right and stock some more units
- 15y ago

xahrepap 15y ago

Here's what I'm getting from Farnell: > Site unavailable > Our websites are currently unavailable whilst we perform a scheduled system upgrade. Scheduled? Yeah, if by scheduled they mean "unexpected but seriously needed" then I'll buy in to that. :)

Ecio78 15y ago
probably it's just a fixed message they have on their system (load balancers?) that pops up when the real webservers are meltin^H^H^H^H^H^H not responding :)

steeves 15y ago

Was anyone here able to order?

donniezazen 15y ago
I got one.
djhworld 15y ago
I've registered my interest with RS components but I doubt I'll be quick enough to get one when they go on sale

lancefisher 15y ago

Fulfillment by Amazon would be awesome for this. Free two-day shipping and the site wouldn't go down. Edit: Seriously, you send them a big box, and they mail out all the little boxes. Check it out: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm#!features-and-benefits http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

rmoriz 15y ago
how would they handle RMA? RMA for such devboards are very common, even the TI folks had several issues with the recent BeagleBone...
- Lewisham 15y ago
  Amazon deals with this too. [1] The TL;DR is that Amazon will take back units, and if they're marked as bad (presumably by the customer), Amazon holds on to them in their center, and can then ship them back to you. It's basically exactly the same as normal retail. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200386180#returns http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_r...
- lancefisher 15y ago
  Amazon has a complete plan for returns, and handles them for you. "Returned unit is added to your inventory and designated "Unfulfillable." You can create a removal order to have the unit returned to you." You can read more here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200386180#returns http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... Of course there is a cost to having Amazon handle everything, but I'd happily pay a little more for a board I could order through Amazon.
forza 15y ago
While it would have been a good idea to distribute some of the devices from the US that wasn't the main problem. A common way to do a launch like this is: 1. Make people register with their e-mail adress. 2. Send order links with unique and expiring tokens in batches. 3. Process payments.

sowbug 15y ago

Probably no more than a curiosity, but http://cn.element14.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?id=2081185&Ntt=raspberry http://cn.element14.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?id=2081... (Farnell's China site) will show you the product page. Even Google Translate seems to be slashdotted, so I'm not going to try to get through that checkout process.

revelation 15y ago

What a tremendous failure. Why check with your distributors before going live? It's not even the traffic; RS never sold any and for the rare moment that you could get to Farnell, they were already (or always have been) out of stock from minute one.

noonespecial 15y ago
The tweets from the foundation make it look more like Farnell actually took about 10 minutes to sell what they had. Nobody's quite sure whats up with RS yet.
- revelation 15y ago
  Then I blame their fucked up shop system with yet another site for every other region? All I can say is that one minute after launch, the product page on Farnell was showing "out of stock". After that, the site never loaded again. Apparently the only way you could actually get one is through some back of the woods partner site of them in Australia. Hooray.
  - xelfer 15y ago
    I couldn't even find it on the Australian site. I got it into a shopping cart on the UK one, but it died while trying to create my account.
    - bigiain 15y ago
      I managed to get a confirmation for an order of two through the Australian Element14 site - it took a dozen or so reloads to get the product into the cart, then almost an hour to get through the payment process (I was already registered from previous purchases).
      - finnw 15y ago
        According to the blog at raspberrypi.org (currently offline) they are limiting orders to 1 per customer. So it will be interesting to see if this order goes through.

endlessvoid94 15y ago

I'm sorry, but I don't know what Raspberri PI is. The site literally doesn't tell me anything about the actual product. I see an image of an arduino-like board -- is that it? Not being snotty or anything, I just literally can't find any information on the site.

noonespecial 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi There's usually more at their site, they went static about a half hour ago because of the load on their servers.

waitwhat 15y ago

People might have some luck with their telephone ordering RS Online: +44 8457 201201 Farnell: +44 8447 111111 (Although I have been on hold with RS for a while now...)

corin_ 15y ago
01536 201201 a cheaper number for RS - but yeah, the wait could be a while..
waitwhat 15y ago
After 25 minutes on hold with RS, I spoke to an agent. She was (understandably) a bit flustered, so this might not be correct, but what I gathered was: * She couldn't take an order * They weren't going to be able to take an order today * What I should be doing is "registering an interest" online when the website comes back up * Noone had ordered anything today, although a few had managed to register an interest before the website melted
- corin_ 15y ago
  The one I just spoke to said they are waiting for managers to come in to sort out what's going on, so far they don't even have stock numbers and all they know about this product is what's shown on their own website.

jrmg 15y ago

Curious as to why they chose 6AM UK time to launch. I wonder if RS or Farnell tech staff are actually at work ready to handle the server problems?

steeves 15y ago
Maximize the amount of publicity throughout the day perhaps?
semisight 15y ago
The first batch was limited to 10K units. Their logic was probably that the most devoted fans would take the time to get up early, and the rest would buy from the subsequent batches.

w-ll 15y ago

It seams neither of their distributors where shipping these to the US?

TomAnthony 15y ago

RS on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/rselectronics https://twitter.com/#!/rselectronics They tweeted at 6am to link to the page, then not since. Farnell on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/farnellnews https://twitter.com/#!/farnellnews They at least tweeted at 6.30 to say they are trying to fix the problems.

TomAnthony 15y ago

Phoned RS and the hold message is great: "But you don't have to wait. With our world class system you can be confident you can get what you want when want it. Did you know while you listened to this message you could have placed your order online."

switz 15y ago

What's the prices in USD (I'm seeing $50.45 from Farnell)? Has anyone from the US officially ordered one? Shipping?

waitwhat 15y ago

The Farnell product page came up briefly for me: http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspber... (but the servers are still melting, so the buy links weren't working)

flannell 15y ago

Just got a broken CSS site, now says; http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185 http://uk.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspber... Availability: Awaiting Delivery ... so back to work...

rjsamson 15y ago

It looks like the RS site is coming back online - but their Raspberry Pi product page still only says "register to express an interest"...

rjsamson 15y ago

The hard link that RS had given out on their twitter was here: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberrypi http://uk.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberry... if anyone wants to keep trying...

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
That gives me, in the UK, "Register here to express an interest in Raspberry Pi". Which I did. Farnell then tell you: "By providing your contact details you are agreeing for your details to be used for marketing purposes by companies within the Premier Farnell Group." Which I find rather off-putting.
- DanBC 15y ago
  And since they are, in theory, business to business you don't get the already weak UK legal spam protection.

locusm 15y ago

I managed to buy one in Australia, I had it in my cart at about 4:10PM, took till 2 mins ago(5:08PM) to finish checkout. No word if its a backorder or not...

locusm 15y ago
Also, weird that Farnell had 2 product pages, one for $38AUD, another for $50 - both were listed as model B.

tomdeakin 15y ago

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120228006472/en/RS-Components-Announces-Launch-Raspberry-Pi-35 http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120228006472/en/RS-C... That's from RS's Twitter feed. Not exactly the praises I'd sing right now.

TomAnthony 15y ago

RS are apparently refusing to sell to private people - business orders only according to several people on Twitter who got through on the phone. Nice job.

__alexs 15y ago
They are a trade supplier, usually you can just invent a company name for the purposes of the order though. They don't check your VAT registration or anything.

akavel 15y ago

On one hand, old wisdom creeps in: "if you really want something done well, do it yourself". But on the other hand, if they happened to fail selling at raspberrypi.com, everyone and his dog would be accusing them of hubris and suggesting they should have relied on "verified distributors". The only thing I'm a bit sad about, is that probably the distro companies will evade any consequences. And even if they didn't, it would probably hit some random guys and not anyone really responsible for the incompetency. Edit: I think I would feel some evil (bad, bad me!) satisfaction if R-Pi Foundation would punish the distro corps by not letting them distribute any further batches of R-Pi for as long as possible. But again, that would probably hurt most the common employees, not the management.

waitwhat 15y ago
My guess is that the current batch will stay exclusive to the current distributors, but this mess will encourage the Foundation to add new distributors for all future product. So the distributors will have some consequences: a smaller share of future orders.
Lewisham 15y ago
One picks their partners. It's certainly not the first time things have gone badly wrong when picking a partner, and you'd think that as a bunch of techies they might have seen this coming. It's clear they chose their partners based on their manufacturing chops, rather than their retail chops. To be fair, RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities. Arguably what Raspberry Pi could/should have done was use Arduino's model of having licensed manufacturers and they could have sat in front of it, and, as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, just ship giant boxes to Amazon to actually do all the dirty work. This would have covered the US, Europe and Japan (if you ship to all Amazon's fulfillment centers), which would have been plenty I think.
- DanBC 15y ago
  They're both part of large international companies. This first shipment is disappointing to many people. Hopefully crashing the servers so hard will give both these distributors some idea of what the demand is, and they'll get some large production runs going, and shift some stock to international distribution partners. > RS Components has a huge customer base in the UK; it's basically The Place You Go when you need electronic components in large quantities. RS is where you go when you have an account and need small amounts of components on a regular basis. Buying large quantities of components results in a very frustrating experience. See, for example, the way they sell surface mount components. Buy qty 500 of 0805 SM resistors and Farnell will send you a strip of 500 while RS will sell you 50 little strips of 10 per strip. Or the way that individual parts are bagged.

X-Istence 15y ago

The electronics suppliers are not used to this kind of traffic. I remember Ti's website grounding to a halt when I was first in college when they released a new kit for free, and in the past when they have done coupons for half off certain high value items. Interesting side note, Ti for its free samples uses Digikey to process them (same address, same exact boxes, packaging and onetime when I ordered a free sample I got Digikey note rather than a Ti note :P) The traffic for those websites generally is very low, I can't imagine that they are ready for anything to what they are seeing right now. I do wish they had also launched with Digikey my favourite electronic parts distributor. Their shipping is always top notch and their service is absolutely fantastic.

yardie 15y ago
That wasn't the case for my last order from TI. I ordered there EZ430 launchpad kits and according to the shipping label it came from a TI office in malaysia. I was originally going to go through Digikey but they wanted 5x ($20 instead of $4) the price.
- X-Istence 15y ago
  You purchased them from TI. I was referring to their samples. All the stuff I've purchased from TI has indeed been shipped directly from TI itself and not through Digikey.
  - ssmall 15y ago
    If I remember right, last time I got samples from TI they shipped from them and not from digikey. Its been a little bit. Location might play in to it some, I live about 15 min away from their headquarters.
    - X-Istence 15y ago
      That is entirely possible, but with over 20+ sample shipments over a year while living in Phoenix I only received samples shipped from Digikeys facilities.

DanBC 15y ago

BBC Radio Four's "Today" programme are talking about Raspberry PI right now. They haven't mentioned server problems yet, or the fact that it's sold out already. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/default.stm) (7:45am Wednesday 29th Feb)

noonespecial 15y ago
7:51: Now they have. Right after thought of the day. With a laugh.
Someone 15y ago
It made it to television, too, fove minutes ago, in the BBC News.

polshaw 15y ago

I can't say I can hold zero blame for the rPi gang on this clusterfuck.. offloading the task was never going to help, it should have been obvious RS/Farnell were not ready- Amazon were the only retailer that could have handled it. But I don't see why they couldn't have handled the orders themselves (Amazon again?). Apparently someone from RS sales has now said they aren't selling any until the end of the week! How insanely disorganised. And 10K was also clearly never going to be close-- there were even far more forum members than this. I wouldn't be so grumpy if they didn't make me get up at 6AM for this crap.

Ecio78 15y ago
"They’ll be manufacturing and distributing the devices on behalf of the Raspberry Pi Foundation" I dont think Amazon is in the business of manufactoring hardware for others.
- noonespecial 15y ago
  Yes, but this was the launch being done with boards that were already built in China. What they really wanted to have happen today was to get the 10,000 units into the hands of their fans as quickly and painlessly as possible, get a polite apology to those who didn't get one, and then hit the PR bell with their big brass "sold them all in 10 minutes" hammer. "Nobody knows what the hell happened but I didn't get one" is probably not the takeaway they were hoping for on launch day.
  - Lewisham 15y ago
    Yeah, not getting one is one thing. The probably inevitable emails of "Yeah, you know we charged your credit card and said we'd ship you a Raspberry Pi... well, we're not... please wait 4-8 weeks" are far, far worse.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
ejenkinsiii 15y ago
Thank you for this clarification, and nicely said would've been nice to get an update a few hours ago stating they weren't taking U.S sales, same thing happen for the eBay auction, forgive me HN just needed to vent

ukdm 15y ago

FYI, if you order through Farnell, the total comes to £31.86 with free delivery. The device is actually £26.55 but then there's VAT to add in the UK.

ww520 15y ago

What kind of casing is there for holding the board? It would nice to have a case, like the Marvell wallplug computer.

marklittlewood 15y ago

I believe in eating your own dog food but it's fine if @Raspberry_Pi use someone else's tech for their ecommerce.

mrpippy 15y ago

Everyone in the US: The Raspberry Pi is now listed on Newark/element14 (Farnell's US site): http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/dp/83T1943 http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/dp/83T1943 It's $35, although there's also a 30 day lead time and a $20 handling fee (because it's shipping directly from the UK).

sitharus 15y ago
Ouch, it's less than that in NZ from element14!
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
That's a bit silly - can't they send a big box full to the US and use a US distributor (I'm in the UK FWIW).
ryan-c 15y ago
I placed an order this morning and just got an email with an expected ship date of May 20th.

Kaostricks 15y ago

Waiting for this.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

linker3000 15y ago

Gosh - this person on ebay ships in 5-6 days and has already sold 28. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290677406685 http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290... /Ya think?

robinduckett 15y ago
I don't know how he can get away with this. To have that many he must have a deal with RS - the 5 - 6 day shipping date must be first class after he receives however many he's ordered through RS as a sub-distributer otherwise this goes against the 1 per person completely.
- linker3000 15y ago
  What he says he has, and what he has in reality are possibly quite different. He's sold 28 - not sure how many have been delivered Edit: From the RasPi Twitter feed - they said it... @Raspberry_Pi EVERYONE! Stop posting that ebay item!. He is a scammer and getting more sales from here. Pic posted is the Alpha proto board
SteveMoody73 15y ago
Raspberry Pi are recommending that people don't buy them from e-bay. https://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174789853500813312 https://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/17478985350081331...
jakemcgraw 15y ago
Hit the "Report This Item" link

tnajdek 15y ago

I've just ordered one over the phone, Farnell adds a surcharge so the grand total is a little over £36. Surprisingly no wait time on the phone whatsoever! The number is 08447111111.

corford 15y ago
I just called them on that number and was told they've sold out, next batch available in 4 to 5 weeks. Bummer :(

zvrba 15y ago

Maybe I'm clueless, but why would you order one if you already have a PC?

DanBC 15y ago
Because you want a teeny tiny Arm development board? Because you want to make a fanless media server? Because you want to learn programming and your elder brother is hogging the PC surfing for whatever teenage boys surf for?
- zvrba 15y ago
  So it's a minicomputer without the disk, keyboard, mouse, screen, and speakers, which quickly adds up to $250 with cheapest components if you want to use it as a general-purpose computer. At the same time, it runs linux and the same linux distro runs also in qemu, so you can do most of the develompent without actual hardware. So where's the rush, why does everybody have to get it right now?
  - outworlder 15y ago
    Really, can't you think of any use for a powerful, small, dirt cheap ARM computer?
  - DanBC 15y ago
    I'm not sure why there's such a rush. It's a really neat device. I haven't been excited by a gadget for a few years, and this is quite exciting. But I'm happy to wait for some months before I get one. I guess there's some kudos or cachet or whatnot tied up with owning one of the first batch; with being one of the first 10,000 people to have blogs up about programming the device.
  - eupharis 15y ago
    No. $250 is ridiculous, even for buying everything new. I just spent 2 minutes googling: Amazon Class Class 10 8 GB SD Card: $9 Best Buy 20" LCD: $90 Keyboard: $15 Mouse: $7.54 Speakers: $10.54 Total: $132.08 If you go to your local thriftstore, you could get all of these for <$50. Not sure if you have ever been a poor kid or not, but take it from me, this computer WILL bring computing to kids who would not otherwise have access.

illumen 15y ago

Competition in the computer education space is nice. OLPC comes with: screen, case, power supply, battery, cam, Source Code, wifi, training, & doesn't require £400 TV that can run code already.

suckerpunch 15y ago

Man... I currently work in the same company as Ian Livingstone and he promised a couple of us some boards to use in our next project. I hope he comes through. I started off on the Beeb and the ZX Spectrum and it's be great to come full circle 30 years later :D

krelian 15y ago

I'll admit that I haven't been following this very closely, what makes this product this craze worthy compared to something like the Arduino?

listic 15y ago
The fact that it's a personal computer, probably.
semanticist 15y ago
It's not really directly comparable to an Arduino - it's a full-blown ARM Linux computer, with HDMI, ethernet, and a couple of orders of magnitude more RAM than an Arduino. It also has some limited IO available, if you're prepared to solder headers onto the board. An Arduino is basically a whole bunch of IO, including PWM output and analogue input, that you can wrap up with some glue logic or send straight to a computer. If you want to interface with a range of sensors/motors in a self-contained unit, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino actually make a good combination - you can write your logic code in whatever language you like in a Linux environment, and use the Arduino to interface it with the real world.
- glogla 15y ago
  Yes, the combination would be interesting. Lot of projects in our new media/intermedia/interactive art lab use Arduino for interfacing with buttons, ultrasound sensor, pressure sensors and similar gizmos, while using normal PC for logic or video playback on projectors or something. Raspberry is capable enough for that (though I'm not sure the artists would be happy hacking it in python instead of Processing ;) ), pc's are big and ugly and having two miniature computers doing the whole thing would be really cool. It would also make sense for (noncritical) monitoring systems, where Arduino can interface with pretty much anything, and raspberry could either display things on monitors, or make a web page for remote monitoring, no problem. (you add ethernet to Arduino and run web server on it, sure, but I would never do something that horrible to the little ATmega.)
  - semanticist 15y ago

fmstephe 15y ago

This reaction is really surprising to me. The Raspberry Pi charity was set up in order to produce a product that could be used as an education tool. They have managed a spectacular feat, that has been 6 years in the making. This is a very exciting development but not just from a technical point of view. The Raspberry Pi represents the idea that computers are interesting to us intrinsically, that there is real value in providing a platform that allows for the development and satisfaction of a crucial intellectual curiosity. The true value of the Raspberry Pi will not be found in our mailboxes in the next few months. It will be in the possibility that the next generation will have something to hack on that prioritises learning and discovery over walled gardens. Sorry for the preachy tone (it's not intended), I am sure that most people feel the same way (or something similar), but it feels like we have lost some perspective while getting up at 6am to order some electronics over the internet. This is a great day. (I have a son and the Raspberry Pi feels like the most exciting project I have seen to date)

PKeeble 15y ago
Education might be the stated aim of the project but its not the limit of the device. This is a device similar to an Arduino except for the fact its got HDMI, USB, is about 700 times faster and in the order of 256 million times more RAM and its only 25% more expensive. Its a hardware hackers delight and a desktop capable computer. It is also a very real competitor for nettops which sell in the millions at a price point 5-10x higher than this. It may very well be used by students to code, but that will be a niche it falls into right behind becoming the cheapest desktop capable computer ever built that isn't locked down. This could very well start a revolution in portable desktop computers that are really cheap. I personally think it is an exciting device but let down by the narrow vision of its application.
- fmstephe 15y ago
  I agree with everything you have said about the potential of the Raspberry Pi. My surprise was at the tone of the reaction on this thread. That these people have spent this long on such a worthy project and have produced something that is probably truly exceptional. We should be grateful and excited. I don't think it has been let down at all. We will all get one, just maybe not immediately.

unwind 15y ago

Too late to have someone change the typo in the product's name in the title? It ends with a 'Y', not an 'I'. Aaargh.

obtu 15y ago
Capitalisation too: Raspberry Pi

pavlov 15y ago

I got an order in this morning at Farnell Finland, and just received an order confirmation by email. The delivery date is quoted as "week 16", which is mid-April. Oh well.

adaml_623 15y ago

Given the large amount of worry on this thread about getting one of the first 10000 I'm really looking forwards to seeing hundreds of blog posts and stories about people doing really interesting thing with their hard-fought purchases. I'm only being half sarcastic. I really would like to see people do cool things with these. And I will be disappointed if it turns out that 9500 of them end up in a drawer after the first weekend.

freehunter 15y ago
I would fear more that 9500 of them end up on eBay at $200 per unit until the next batch comes along. I really don't like people profiting from squatting.
- ajays 15y ago
  Then the eBay buyers would post projects. Eventually the units (or most of them) will end up in the hands of a hacker, regardless of the route taken to get there.
  - gaius 15y ago
    They're not supposed to end up in the hands of hackers for $200+. They're supposed to end up in the hands of kids for $35.
    - learc83 15y ago
      This first run is not the educational release. These are specifically for hackers. The educational release will be later this year, and will include cases, power supplies, and an OS for the same price. This release is lacking all those. This early release is for hackers to play with, develop projects, and write tutorials, so that there is an ecosystem already in place for the educational release.
      - moonchrome 15y ago
        >This early release is for hackers to play with, develop projects, and write tutorials, so that there is an ecosystem already in place for the educational release. A shame that the GPU specs aren't open, I would love to get in to GPU driver development with something like this.

rmk2 15y ago

I am really disappointed about their choice of distributors. Neither Farnell's nor RS Components subsidiaries in Germany and Austria ship to private individuals, you have to be a corporate buyer in order to be able to order from them. And since they "have" local subsidiaries, the "international" sites of both companies don't ship to either country. In short: in Germany or Austria, you cannot buy the Raspberry Pi unless you go through an intermediary. This seems to be a really bad choice for a platform aimed at education. And judging by the Twitter comments, at least (potential) customers in Sweden and the Netherlands have the same problem. http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174752572194824192 http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174752572194824192 http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174779094783897600 http://twitter.com/#!/Raspberry_Pi/status/174779094783897600 I guess what bothers me is how they don't seem to care too much about not being buyable by private entities in a number of European countries, or how they at least didn't bother to check up-front... Still, I hope I can get one of the next batches somehow

maayank 15y ago
You can use a forwarding service like http://www.ukpostbox.com http://www.ukpostbox.com
- rmk2 15y ago
  I know that there are ways. There is apparently also an intermediary i Austria. I'll have a look at that forwarding site. I just wanted to point that out, since it gets drowned a bit on Twitter and I didn't see much posted about it.
ArnoVanLumig 15y ago
Private entities can place an order at the Dutch Farnell by email if the total sum is over 50 euros. See for instance [1]. I could not find similar regulations at the German Farnell site. [1] http://nl.farnell.com/images/nl_NL/pdf/Particulier_voorwaarden.doc http://nl.farnell.com/images/nl_NL/pdf/Particulier_voorwaard...
willyt 15y ago
Maybe its different here, but I've been ordering from RS in the uk for years as a private entity. The site is targeted at B2B and makes it seem like you have to be a company but actually you don't really. I think I just put in n/a or something for company name on the registration page. You don't have to have a trade account, they take credit cards. Orders below £50 you pay £5 for delivery.

napierzaza 15y ago

What better way to teach young people about the current computing landscape. Make a product based on a closed-source proprietary chip-set, distribute through middle men that deal only with other companies. Hope you like working with the Pi in class, you can't buy one for yourself or get to the meat of the system without an NDA. If you were interested in that...

yahelc 15y ago

I'm a little peeved. I signed up for the email notifications and did the confirmation and everything, and never got the email saying they were opening up for orders. :-/

cicero 15y ago

This is a very inexpensive product produced by a charity. How can they afford what it would take for a launch like this to run flawlessly? I work for a non-profit that does all it can to provide a high quality service at a below market price, so I have sympathy for these guys. If you want first class service from day one, expect to pay a little more than $35. Even Apple with their high profit margins has had difficulty with launches for high demand products.

djhworld 15y ago
Yeah the amount of moaning is really shocking, I'm disappointed too but I'll be able to get a R-PI eventually. Patience is a virtue
- ssmall 15y ago
  With things like this I'd rather wait for the 2nd or 3rd run anyways. They are a small group who are doing this on a shoestring budget for a price point with a tiny profit margin and targeting a highly technical audience; I won't be shocked if there are some small hardware bugs that make it past QA in the first run. Its worth the waiting a little bit to let them iron all that out.
  - alexchamberlain 15y ago
    I was thinking about this, but given they've got an OS running, it is good enough for £20, and I'll replace it when necessary.
    - ssmall 15y ago
      You can have an OS running and not have it 100% stable for long term with small latent bugs. I've actually got a prototype board I'm working on right now that runs Linux just fine but will lock up and need to be rebooted every few days. But as you said, for 20 quid who cares?
fmstephe 15y ago

joejohnson 15y ago

What cool plans do people have for these if they can get their hands on one?

finnw 15y ago
Probably not quite what the designers intended, but... I plan to put one in an aluminium box with some SRAM and an anti-tamper switch, store keys in the SRAM and use it to back up TrueCrypted thumb drives. Should be more secure than mounting them on an internet-connected PC just to back them up.

donohoe 15y ago

What do people plan to use their Raspberry PI for? Given the nature of HN I'm intrigued to see what unique and innovate ideas people here may have...

drivebyacct2 15y ago
It is capable of doing 1080p decoding. I no longer need a Blu-ray player, Boxee box, Roku box, anything. I have an HDTV, I plug this into it with XBMC installed. Boom. I can stream anything from anywhere. It's also AirPlay enabled. Any TV just became a very smart TV for $35. If you're not familiar with XBMC, prepare to have your mind blown.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Not having Wifi kills this option for me personally.
  - slash-dot 15y ago
    Coudn't you get wifi via usb?
  - jackolas 15y ago
    stick a dongle on it.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    Really? I'm fortunate that my parents recently built a house and wired ethernet everywhere (I'm tired of helping my dad try to configure transcoding servers to stream to broken DLNA implementations that vary between the 3 different Samsung LCDs he bought within 3 months) and I'll be doing the same.
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    Buy a WRT54gl, put dd-wrt on it, set it up as a client-bridge, now you can network your xbox, HTPC, PS3, etc. easily.

ef4 15y ago

A recurring theme in these comments has been the hassles of doing things like fulfillment (can't use Amazon) and payment-processing (can't use Kickstarter) across national borders. If you want to build the killer app for the 21st century, figure out how to help people route money and physical objects globally, with all these obnoxious borders abstracted away. ;-)

slash-dot 15y ago

What's the max resolution on the gpu?

jacquesm 15y ago

I love it how people are pissing on this as though it is a failure. Really, unbelievable. Here is a group of dedicated guys and girls that work their asses off to produce a $25 computer with more punch than you'd ever think possible for that amount of money. Not only do they deliver, they are sold out in absolute record time with the sites simply collapsing under the load. I'd chalk this one up as a success, definitely not a failure and I fully expect the second (and subsequent) runs of the RaspberryPi to have a similar effect. Kudos to Eben, Liz and the rest of the team, you guys really rock and I hope that you won't let the sourpusses ruin your fantastic day for you. I've watched the RaspberryPi saga closely from day 1 and I'm very very happy to see it come to fruit ;)

lsllc 15y ago
Agreed! The $25 price point is incredible, and selling 10K units in 10 mins is a runaway success! I placed my order and will happily to wait until April, until then I will continue my project(s) working on a BeagleBone ($89) and a PandaBoard ($149).
- digispaghetti 15y ago
  I feel the same way (although I was a little grumpy at first, but it was 6am and I hadn't had a coffee yet!)
asb 15y ago
Not to forget: they all have day jobs. People have been worrying for ages about how Raspberry Pi will deal with the demand and get out of a process of making batches, having them sell out instantly and then using that capital to build the next batch. Eben talks about why the RS and Farnell partnership is a big deal and will help to solve that problem in this video interview: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/02/28/2347222/raspberry-pi-now-has-distributors----and-will-soon-have-boards-for-all-video http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/02/28/2347222/raspberr...
- jacquesm 15y ago
  Indeed. Just to put into perspective what a huge event this launch was: for a short while (about 10 minutes) the RasberryPi outsold the iPhone 4:1. Of course, Apple moves 250 iphones per minute all the time but there was absolutely no way that a small outfit like this could have anticipated and/or met this insane surge of demand. I sure hope it validates the concept to everybody that was still doubting and I hope that we'll soon be able to mark the 100K, 1M and up milestones of units sold.

mrbill 15y ago

Ordered two from Newark (I'm in the US); the order confirmation email has an Expected Ship Date of 5/10/12. I've got a BeagleBoard C2 and a BeagleBone to play with until then...

RobertKohr 15y ago

This all seems like a pricing problem. If you don't have enough product to meet demand, you charge more. I guess in the end it is worth it though. The amount of hype that surrounds selling out is great.

eavc 15y ago
But in this case, the price-point is highly sensitive. The reason there is so much demand is because it is insanely cheap. It's exciting because of what it signals, and even modestly raising the price changes the narrative.
teraflop 15y ago
If your goal is to maximize profit, sure. But Raspberry Pi is a registered non-profit organization.