World's Raspberry Pi supply jammed in factory blunder
Shipments of the long-awaited and heavily fought over Raspberry Pi boards could be delayed thanks to a manufacturing cock-up. The assembly lines churning out the first 10,000 units used the wrong kind of RJ45 networking jack, according to the team behind the $35 Linux computer, and the parts will need to be replaced before they …
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Even allowing for the idiotic American date format, shouldn't Pi day be 3/14/15 (if truncating) or 3/14/16 (if rounding), or perhaps 3/14/15 9:26:53
Idiotic date formats
Well, Euro and American date formats are both pretty silly in the computer age if you think about it. The ISO8601 standard of YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss is the only one that actually makes sense to me (breaking it down from big to small units), and also sorts correctly in a file listing. I switched to it in the 90's as a matter of convenience. M/D/Y isn't terribly clear in written form, and neither is D/M/Y. And with that espousing of my opinion, I've now probably pissed off two continents. :)
For fun - can get to 4 digit precision with ISO8601.
ISO8601 FTW 2012-03-14 15 (course there is no 9 for minutes unless kill the leading 0 to get 5 digits PI precision, but thats cheating a bit.)
Re: Idiotic date formats
Growing up and going to school in the US, it was always "Month 99, 19xx". I found it easy to learn other, better date formats, though, owing to my being an old Army brat, and seeing my Dad's letters home from Saigon headed, for example, "16 Mar 1967", which actually made more sense, even though these days I jump back and forth between them, depending on circumstances or requirements; many forms ask for DD/MM/YY, some ask for YYYY/MM/DD.
I quickly got the hang of the YYYY/MM/DD format in the course of cataloguing my bootleg tape collection and realizing that using this format in playlist and folder names caused them to sort very nicely in View By Name windows and iTunes. When I've got a hankering to hear that historic May 1977 Pink Floyd Boston Garden show, it's a helluva lot easier to Sort By Name in a playlist for "pink floyd 1977.05.09 boston ma" than it is to root around for "pink floyd boston ma 05.09.77".
Re: Idiotic date formats
Anyone using 2-digit years in this day and age should be shot.
But yes, when I write I usually write the 4 digit year and a 3 character month. Is the most unambiguous format I can think of.
Being a database programmer for a number of years, I came to realise that textual date/time conversion is one of the most irritatingly annoying things to get right and responsible for so many bugs.
Re: Idiotic date formats
is this because you're worrying about the year 2100 problem?
Frankly (and as long as I can escape from gun-toting date nazis to survive long enough) if I'm still around long enough for two-digit years to be an issue again I'll be delighted.
Re: Idiotic date formats
I'm more concered about 1913 problem.
Obviously you are doomed to repeat history.
ISO 8601
I switched to this format ever since I started putting dates on filenames. Much easier to sort 'em, and databases will also parse it w/o problems, avoiding the DMY/MDY trouble.
Downvote
It's not because somebody's already gone to nanoseconds, or for insulting the Month-no-the-Daythers on this side of the pond.
It's because if you round the to second it's 3/14/15 9:26:54. 3.141592653_5_ etc. (That's not rounded, I just stopped).
Re: Idiotic date formats
That's fine for current dates, but you fail to consider historical dates.
Date of birth being a perfect example, we're now in 2012 so anyone over 88 will present a serious problem for any date related software storing only a 2 digit year. That problem will get increasingly more obvious for any numpty storing years as 2 digits as this century continues.
Do try to think these things through before you comment.
Re: Idiotic date formats
find ~/music -name "*pink floyd*77*" -exec /usr/local/mplayer "{}" \;
What's wrong with you? :D
/troll
Re: Idiotic date formats
"find ~/music -name "*pink floyd*77*" -exec /usr/local/mplayer "{}" \;
What's wrong with you? :D
/troll"
clearly thats wrong as your using the antiquated mplayer and not the better current ffplay from the ffmpeg/avconv cross platform compiled package :)
Some of us could solder a replacement on. It's irony that computer designed to teach people about the low level aspects of computing is delayed due to a manufacturing error. Perhaps they're learning too?
I really don't know why schools don't use Arduino or something.
video out?
I just shopped for an Arduino at the same price as the Raspberry Pi and it didn't appear to even include video output.
So to answer your question... price!
"It's irony that computer designed to teach people about the low level aspects of computing is delayed due to a manufacturing error."
well it not common practice today to learn solder ironry in school, in fact you need to go back to the medieval times to see ironwork in common teaching use :)
Can I please buy one made in the UK
Yes I know the goverment import tax kinda stuffs any form of UK manufacturing as you pay tax on imported components and alot less tax on a imported finished made product! That all said I'd happily pay an extra £10 for one made in the UK. It's cheap enough that the extra wouldn;t realy be an issue for alot of people who would then have the choice. Fact is there is enough demand, even at the higher price for being made in the UK.
Now I'm not saying a UK made one would be any better and would not of had this exact issue; But I'd feel better in buying one or two.. Just to highlight how the UK goverment is failing UK manufacturers.
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
It would never be £10 extra. The extra tax would amount to 20p at most. Is it not worth having manufacturing that will not blindly replace components with cheaper but unsuitable ones...
The Raspberry Pi foundation made a lot of noise about tax - probably because other reasons they have for building in China are not as marketable - but the actual duty that would have to be paid is next to nothing.
Blaming UK.gov for this is silly. Give us UK raspberries!
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
> I'd happily pay an extra £10 for one made in the UK
You can easily achieve the same result. Buy a Pi, then walk into your nearest highstreet technology shop. Deposit £10 on the counter and walk out.
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
It wasn't the extra tax it was the lack of companies that could make it in the quantities / timescale.
The problem now is the infrastructure. You might have workers in Britain but the component suppliers are in China, the PCB makers are in China, the makers of the machines to make the PCBs are in China and pretty soon the machines to make the machines to make the PCBs will be in China.
That was Apples complaint about making the iPad in the USA. It would only cost 5% more in labour but there was nowhere left in America with the infrastructure of so many subassembly and component makers together in one place.
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
Oh god let's not compare Apple's (or any major manufacturer) production needs with the Raspberry Pi, a single very small - single chip - board made in 10K quantities (maybe 100K next).
I'm quite sure the UK has enough capacity for this. In fact I was just quoted for a 5K production run for my company.
It's not like mass producing electronics is incredibly difficult
You can easily set up a state of the art production line for far less than 1000k Euros, including setup and the building. The equipment alone just costs about 300k - 600k Euros, depending what you want.
That is for a setup where you pop in the rolls of components and the unpopulated boards and get out complete PCBs.
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
"The problem now is the infrastructure."
So the western world, whom invented those machines and made the stuff itself ages ago, is now a wateland filled with an unemployed labourforce.
"That was Apples complaint about making the iPad in the USA. It would only cost 5% more in labour but there was nowhere left in America with the infrastructure of so many subassembly and component makers together in one place."
Then enforce or persuade them to have stayed. Because ONCE that infrastructure WAS here. And if the labourcost is supposedly negligible then why did they leave in the first place?
This just doesn't add up! There's NO excuse to not make it in UK or USA. Especially since it's all a low scale production.
Re: It's not like mass producing electronics is incredibly difficult
> You can easily set up a state of the art production line
I'm guessing, but here "easily" means: 2 years to secure finance, find the right location, agree the zoning, order the equipment and outfit the building. After that, recruit and train the personnel - then wait for orders to start being diverted to this "local" line.
The problem is not so much setting up an electronics production company. The problem is maintaining it in profit, so when the occasional British manufacturer does come along, there is spare manufacturing capacity that they can just slot in to. GB is such an expensive place to make stuff that all the plants have to run at as close to 100% as possible. That means there is no spare capacity for "walk-in" customers.
Fortunately, China has so many manu's with such high capacities that they can fit a bitsy-little run of 10,000 units in between the cracks in their bread-and-butter orders.
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
"This just doesn't add up! There's NO excuse to not make it in UK or USA. Especially since it's all a low scale production."
Well, there must be otherwise the production would be local, wouldn't it? Revealed preference and all that.
I can think at least of...
1) Expensive workforce relative to the skill set
2) Red tape everywhere
3) Strong labor unions (Would anyone want a union rep on the board who sees the company as the enemy? Hell NO.)
4) Companies that don't have inside lobbyists seen as whipping boys for politicians and tax money generators.
5) Don't know what's coming down the legislative pipe (the last thing I heard was mandatory quota of women on the board... wut?). Generally, companies are seen as subject to populist whim. "Then enforce or persuade them to have stayed." You see what I mean?
6) Uncertainty regarding the future of the EUR, inflation and general blowout.
You see
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
"Would anyone want a board member who sees the employees as the enemy?"
Hell yeah, so long as the board gets their megabonuses, stuff the staff who bring the money in.
John Lewis don't seem to have that problem.
Re: It's not like mass producing electronics is incredibly difficult
My last job was for a Canadian telecom OEM. We recieved the PCB and stuffed it on 1 of 3 SMT machines in-house. Once the Gerber file is in the system, it's not hard to set it up for a run of 10 or 10000 as long as you have the parts available.
IIRC there would be a stuffing error ~0.1% of the time, which usually meant 4-5 boards on an average run would have to be reworked on the line.
For a part like we're talking about, the rework time for each board would be 5min on a properly set up station or 10min on a regular station. So unless you have a large crew doing the work, we're talking 830 man-hours of work to redo 10k boards.
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
Cos that's how manufacturing works.
Corning, the US glass maker, produced the Gorilla glass on the iPhone at their plant in New York.
Their customers are foxcon in China, so do they carry on making the glass in the US and shipping it to China taking 6weeks to arrive?
What do they do when Apple changed the size of the screen glass 6weeks before launch?
Do they make 6weeks advance production of different sizes in case a new Apple product needs that screen size? Do they airfreight it to China overnight?
Or do they just open a factory next door to Foxcon?
Re: Can I please buy one made in the UK
by "made in the UK" you really mean "assembled in the UK" OC as the majority of parts required to make these have long since gone abroad since 1979 when Margaret (Hilda) Thatcher killed off the new born tech manufactures profit margins in the uk , and OC the Govt needs your TAX so they wont change the rules just to suit any new 2012 UK new born tech manufactures profit margins.
The hand of Sinclair.....
British invention? Large pre-orders? Lots of hype? No on-sale date? Delays and manufacturing problems?
Seems Raspberry Pi are emulating the model of early 80's British computer manufacturers just a tad too closely. :-)
Re: The hand of Sinclair.....
I was thinking more like the RED camera company. Maybe Jim Jannard is running the show.
Re: The hand of Sinclair.....
Yeah they should have called it the 'Electron' ;-)
Solder your own
Interestingly, talking of Sinclair, you could get the ZX81 (and ZX80) as a kit and solder it all up yourself. A friend aquired his ZX81 this way.
I'd certainly give it a go, though soldering SMT components is fiddly...
Re: Solder your own
> you could get the ZX81 (and ZX80) as a kit
Kit computers were common back then. Many were available as they were comparatively quite expensive.
There was even an effort - the ETi Triton, if memory serves, but I cant find any references to it - to walk a user through the whole construction of a kit.
Vic.
Re: The hand of Sinclair..... Not the same as 1980's
A week or two's delay isn't in the same league as the 1980's home micro fiasco.
The foundation would have to delay things for four months to come close.
Acorn started accepting orders in September 1981 there were unconfirmed reports of a handfull of BBC Model A's being received the week before Christmas but it was well into January for confirmed deliveries.. I'd ordered a BB Model B in September and recieved it on Saturday April 10th 1982 SEVEN MONTHS later
The Sinclair computers took even longer to ship and nearly a year to clear the backlog.
Re: The hand of Sinclair..... Not the same as 1980's
I'm still waiting for my ZX81 kit...
I remember a story, may even have been true, of a BBC kit returned to the manufacturer as broken. They opened the case and found all the components carefully and precisely superglued into place...
the so called protection..
is not just protection from hi voltage spikes....
the chokes and coils actually keep the Rx and Tx lines separate.
usually, these components are parts on the actual circut board, but because the RPi needs to keep things small it has to be integrated into the RJ45 socket.
As the problem does not affect the model A boards at all, then I suspect the model A boards will make an appearance a little sooner than anticipated.
paris, because I bet she has an integrated coil !
model A
Probably not sooner since the factory isn't building them yet, and now is delayed fixing these...
Re: model A
its a separate line fixing the borked boards... they have to be corrected by hand.
They apparently are having issues sourcing enough of the correct components for the NEXT run of 100,000+ boards that farnell and RS will be ordering. so in the meantime, a run of 10,000 A boards should not be a problem, no RJ-45, different USB socket and no USB hub Chip...
their will be plenty of people wanting the A board now as it has the same RAM, will be plugging it into a USB hub and using USB WIFI/bluetooth adaptors...
Re: the so called protection..
I think these'll be the little buggers they need...
http://pdf.directindustry.com/pdf/acksys/rj45-connector-with-built-in-line-isolation-transformer-lf1s028-for-cometh-embd/8580-61687.html
There does look to be a bit more to it than just cutting out the spikes!
Re: model A
Fixed by hand? Do you really believe that nonsense?
They'll just dump the defective boards and make new ones.
Sorry to ruin your eco-fantasy but that's how they work in the Far East.
Re: model A
Going to have fun sourcing all the SoC's then, if they dump this batch.
Re: model A
its nothing to do with "eco fantasy" but all to do with economics.
the thing is, who knows what is actually happening. the only official word is from the raspberry foundation who say the boards will have to be repaired by hand... it does not mean this IS what is going to happen, its all speculation.
as I understand things. the boards are in the UK and the problem was found in testing. so for them to be sent back to china for "repair" I doubt would be viable, so a replacement batch is most probably going to be made....
so time to speculate on what's going to happen to the 10000 broken boards? they WONT go in a bin. maybe if they source the correct part, they can sell them direct at a reduced price and the user gets to fix it... how much would you pay for it? put one or two on ebay?
Re: model A
Broadcom have stated they will supply the chips to the Raspberry foundation all the chips they need for as long as they want them.
Re: model A
Nope that's why you make them in the far east.
5mins to rework a board at $5/day salary = 100boards/day = 5c / board
We used to do a lot of this re-engineering. If you are making stuff in China it's cheaper to have it screwed together by hand rather than making the complex mold tool to have plastic parts snap together.
Lone Star!
see title. thumb up to poster who made reference!
This just reinforces
my self-satisfaction in not having attempted to order a Pi at all yet, having seen this debacle coming at least a month in advance.
I figure I'll check back in September or so; maybe, by that point, they'll have got themselves sufficiently sorted out that I can hope to receive the thing in the same year I order it.
Then again -- now that we're hearing they will have trouble sourcing parts for future batches, and yes I know they say it might work out but frankly by this point are you willing to believe that? -- maybe not.
Re: This just reinforces
Blimey, my smugness detector just went off the scale! Thank god for all these psychic people.
Re: This just reinforces
well, dont you just look smug sitting there happy at a MINOR issue in bringing to market a new product.
the problem is not in sourcing parts, its sourcing them in the numbers they need NOW. The manufacturers of the components will have no problem in doing a production run, but that may take 4 weeks or more (at a guess) to get them the the Pi production line.
it really annoys me when people laugh and look smug when a small outfit, doing what they can to bring an amazing product to the masses at a price that anyone can afford. ALL in their own time, and not making money from it, when they hit a minor supply issue you have a small group sitting there laughing, just a adult versions of the school yard bully !
Lets hope next time your given a new job to do at work, lets hope it blows up in your face so we can all do a Nelson Muntz at you !
Re: This just reinforces
"having seen this debacle coming at least a month in advance."
And you didn't warn them?!
Re: This just reinforces
"Lets hope next time your given a new job to do at work, lets hope it blows up in your face so we can all do a Nelson Muntz at you !"
Don't hold your breath too much waiting for that to happen; having committed such errors in the past, I've learned better than to take on a job that's vastly beyond my capabilities. What a shame that the Raspberry Pi Foundation, with the backing of one of the world's leading multi-billion-dollar tech companies, couldn't manage to do likewise.
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