back to article Raspberry Pi sales limits lifted

Hardware hackers and ageing coders have snapped up more than 200,000 Linux running Raspberry Pi gadgets, the charity behind the cut-price computer said today. And, in a far cry from the desperate struggle for kit following the Pi's launch in the Spring, the Raspberry Pi Foundation said its resale partners are no longer …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nowhere near as long as I had to wait for my issue 1 Spectrum at least :)

  2. g e

    YAY!

    Just ordered mine from RS.

    Micro XBMC attempt on the way (in errr maybe 11 weeks, anyway)

    1. Richard Ball

      Re: YAY!

      Picked mine up from the post office this morning.

      Farnell included a wicked t-shirt too.

      Will be trying out Raspbmc this evening.

      1. AstroNutter
        Thumb Up

        Re: YAY!

        I've been using RaspBMC on the PI for a few weeks. Works great with H.264 video over a wired network connection. Still lots of bugs in it, but it's still in development.

  3. Callam McMillan

    Had mine for a few weeks now. As expected, they're not going to replace a full on PC, and the lack of flash is a little annoying but they're great for learing on and hopefully we will be able to get the CSI camera module soon!

    1. Toxteth O'Gravy
      Happy

      Yeah, there should me more PCs out there for learing on... :-)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Dread to think what callum will be learing on when he gets the camera module.

    2. AlbertH
      FAIL

      Flash?

      Of course there's Flash - if you can be bothered to install it.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Rubbish

    Do yourself a favour and get a MK802 which runs Ubuntu (ARM7), has Wifi, 1GB RAM case and well supported 3D hardware (Mali)

    Even runs Android if you prefer.

    1. cliveski

      Re: Rubbish

      ...and costs four times as much.

      Nothing wrong with the MK802, just horses for courses...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Rubbish

        Nope. You can get a MK802 for around £45 quid delivered on Ebay and that's the 1GB RAM version with 4GB Flash.

        After you add tax, shipping, SD card, power supply, hdmi cable and case to the Raspberry Pi it's actually more expensive.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Terminator

          Re: Rubbish - It is!

          The Raspberry is a joke, I got my MK802 (aka AK802 on some Chinese sites like Dealextreme) for a lot less than the $99 official price and it works perfectly, something I cannot say about my Raspberry that throws hissy fits over which sd card I use.

          Also got my chinese Arduino Mega clone (from the same site) plugged into it making the MK802 the perfect development platform.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Rubbish - It is!

            >>I got my MK802

            Well go away and play with it, as well as your MK802

            Just what is all this anger at the suprise popularity of this fruity named device.

            The Raspbery Pi has done exactly what it set out to do, that is raise the profile of the computer and computer science in education, as collateral damage there have been thousands sold to enthusiasts, who will fill out all those tiny niches that a few hudred thousand enthusiasts will find. This will improve the educational offering, making it even more popular.

            Please calm down, what's the problem, your toy not getting any press, well who cares, it's not as if the Pi is stealing your lunch now is it?

        2. IHateWearingATie
          Go

          Re: Rubbish

          Well, at £45 it's almost twice the price of a Raspberry Pi. And at twice the price, I'd expect it to be at least twice as good. Not sure that the extras add much - my ebay adventures for power supply, card etc are probably less than £10 (£3 for a card, £3 for a power supply, £1 for an HDMI cable, £1 for an ethernet cable) - I have spares of all of those but can't resist the excuse to buy shiny new things (even if they are just cables).

          For me the benefit will be eco system - with so much press there should be lots of people developing for them, and lots of 'how to' guides given the last time I cut 'proper' (i.e. not Excel macros etc) code (C++ using VIM on a HP-UX box ) was over 10 years ago.

          Now, what did 'pipe' and 'grep' do again?

          1. ArmanX

            Re: Rubbish

            Counting shipping, etc., I purchased my Pi and all its accessories for:

            $35 for the Pi + $7 shipping

            $10 for a 16 GB SDHC (free shipping, Newegg)

            $4 for a 1000mA phone charger (free shipping, Amazon)

            $2 for an HDMI cable (free shipping, Amazon)

            $0 ethernet cable (I have piles of them laying around)

            $2 keyboard and mouse (yard sale)

            For a grand total of $58. Which is considerably less than £45 (about $70).

            And did I mention that the Raspberry Pi has accelerated video?

            1. Ian Johnston Silver badge
              WTF?

              Re: Rubbish

              If I want a machine to practice programming on, I can install any one of a zillion flavours of Linux in a Virtualbox VM for, erm, nothing at all. In what way is a Pi better than that?

              1. ArmanX

                Re: Rubbish

                >In what way is a Pi better than that?

                Well, it runs on 700mA - a cheap phone charger is fine. So, it's great for projects - a web-based garage door opener, and the like.

                It's also great for schools; $50 gets you a computer for a kid to learn to program on. If they ruin the OS, so what? Just flash 'em another and move on.

                It's even good for businesses - cost savings over a full computer, plus cost savings on energy use, plus time savings, since all you need to do to upgrade is just plug in a new SD card. Obviously it won't replace most desktops, but there are a lot of assembly line processes that this could help.

                If you don't need a cheap, low-powered, custom computer, that's perfectly fine. Not everyone does. But there are quite a few people who do want one - enough, I think, enough to drives sales for a very, very long time.

        3. AlbertH
          Meh

          Re: Rubbish

          Nonsense. The cheapest you can find the 802 (which is really very under-specified for the price) is £98 on Ebay - that's >$130 in today's money.

          If you have a link for ones at $45, I'll take all they have at that price - give us the link!!!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Hmmm...

      All versions out of stock apart from the "English" version at a $10 premium. Doesn't really bode well for future support does it? Nah, I think I'll order a Pi for < 50% of the price and enjoy the extra USB, Ethernet and GPIO connectivity thanks all the same.

    3. Oolons
      Thumb Down

      Re: Rubbish

      $117 plus shipping... Hmm depends what you want to do but since the Pi runs xbmc very well there is no advantage for me. Given the number of people developing for the Pi I'd expect support to be better in the long run - for example they are releasing a kernel using hard-float optimisation and ppl are working on gpu accelerated X.

    4. Bakunin
      Linux

      Re: Rubbish

      The Raspberry Pi can run Debian. Why the hell would I want to pay *more* to have Ubuntu or Android?

      1. ArmanX

        Re: Rubbish

        If I wanted 1 GB of RAM and WiFi, I'd probably just buy a computer - I could get a dual-core 1.8GHz board for that kind of money (RAM and case extra), and it's got a decent video card to boot.

        But that's not the point, is it? This is a hacker's board - buy two or three (or ten), and put them in all kinds of projects. Your garage door need a website? Now it has one. Your television need a mediacenter? Now it has one. You can need an on-board video and audio system? Now it has one.

        It's not always about the best specs. Look at how well the Arduino has done - and it's quite paltry as compared to the Raspberry Pi, at least in terms of RAM and speed. No, this isn't a super-computer. If you were buying this in the hopes that it would replace your desktop, then you were either ill-informed or just largely ignorant.

        But don't order one because of what I said - if you don't want one, don't get one. To each his own, and I'd rather there be more for me :-D

    5. Peter Mount
      WTF?

      Re: Rubbish

      I think you've not got the point - the pi isn't meant to be a general purpose machine. Maybe the MK802 has 1GB of ram etc will it run off AA batteries for example?

      This board is targetting a specific niche which the board you are trying to push probably does not.

      WiFi isn't everything - what use is WiFi if you've got the board attached to a high altitude weather balloon - in fact if you don't need it then why waste the power with one.

      I've actually have had 2 now for some time & so far not needed wifi nor any more ram than the onboard 256. Someone else mentioned no flasg - erm what's SD then? Running fine with 4Gb & could put up to 32Gb if needed.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Rubbish

        @Peter Mount: Of course you can run this off AA batteries, just like the Pi. The Pi is not a great example of power efficient design, it's very wasteful in fact.

        Is an Ethernet port better than Wifi? Are you planning on sending a weather ballon tethered to Ethernet cables, maybe with a few routers/switches along the way to overcome the 100m limit?

        Oh and do show us a Raspberry Pi actually working on a high altitude weather ballon.... I mean actually working, not some fantasies people have.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @Peter re "the pi isn't meant to be a general purpose machine. "

          The Raspberry Pi foundation portrays it as:

          "What’s a Raspberry Pi?

          The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming."

          Many of the small, cheap, computers that have popped up recently will fit this role quite well - and actually better at it than the Pi. It sounds like it's you who don't get the point.

        2. daveake

          Re: Rubbish

          "Oh and do show us a Raspberry Pi actually working on a high altitude weather ballon.... I mean actually working, not some fantasies people have."

          See http://www.daveakerman.com/?p=592

          :)

          1. James Hughes 1

            Re: Rubbish

            Snigger.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm...

    I'm still waiting for mine, I think I have about six weeks left... I can't help thinking that they should have waited to allow the free-for-all until they had a chance of fulfilling the orders within, say 28days.

    The last time I had to wait 80 days was for my Acorn Music 500 for the BBC Master, it was agonising, especially when I found that there was a chance it wouldn't work on the master's souped up 1MHz bus.

    1. ArmanX

      Re: Hmm...

      To be fair, they thought they were going to be able to ship immediately, but then the CE mark and the Ethernet problems arrived, which set them back a fair amount.

      1. Ian Johnston Silver badge
        Thumb Down

        Re: Hmm...

        I'm afraid not. they kept announcing that 10,000 Pis were on their way and then when the Big Day came conceded that those ten thousand did not exist, never had existed and could only be preordered with a time delay of weeks or months. Entirely-preventable-CE-gate, ethernet-gate, power-supply-gate and SD-card-compatibility-gate all came later.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    The Raspberry Pi is already rotten

    The promising new board on the block is the Gooseberry:

    http://gooseberry.atspace.co.uk/

    Board for development (no case), 3x more powerful than the Pi (ARM7 architecture, not ARM6 like the Pi), twice the Pi's RAM (512MB) and Wifi included - all for only £40 including a charger.

    AVAILABLE NOW! (144 remaining as of now) and it's also an UK product!

    Why doesn't El Reg cover this one too?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      and more...

      forgot to add that it already comes with 4GB of Flash storage on the board and includes a MicroSD slot for additional cards up to 32GB. Great, right?

      Come on Reg show this one some love too.

    2. Blane Bramble

      Re: The Raspberry Pi is already rotten

      Except it's not a UK product at all, and currently no Linux distribution works on it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Pint

        Re: The Raspberry Pi is already rotten

        It's a UK product in the sense that it's being made for and sold exclusively (for now at least) by the Gooseberry Team here in in the UK. You could say about the same about the Raspberry Pi, whose reference design is from the US and made in China.

        Ubuntu already works on it: http://gooseberry.atspace.co.uk/?p=77 and Arch Linux has confirmed they'll be running on it soon. The Gooseberry Team is donating two boards to Arch Linux for that purpose. Linux kernel sources are available at https://github.com/amery/linux-allwinner

        Did I mention there's a fully Open Source driver for the Mali GPU? http://limadriver.org/

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The Raspberry Pi is already rotten

          It's not a UK product, it's just the main board out of a Chinese clone tablet. That is, Chinese designed, Chinese manufactured. Nothing wrong with that, but don't try and pretend it has anything at all to do with the UK other than the guy reselling them is here. I suspect the guy selling them hasn't realised he needs to add VAT as well and could be in for a nasty surprise. If Ubuntu works on it, why does it state that no version of Linux works yet?

          1. James Hughes 1

            Re: The Raspberry Pi is already rotten

            Although the CPU is faster, the Mali GPU on the Gooseberry has about a quarter of the 3D performance of the Videocore on the Raspberry PI, but otherwise, seems a good bandwagon marketing attempt, although the VAT will come back to bite the sellers I think. There's room in the market for multiple sellers, although competing with a charity with no employees is not going to be easy.

            JFYI, the Videocore GPU was designed in the UK, the Arm was designed in the UK, and the Raspi board was designed in the UK.

          2. Ian Johnston Silver badge
            Headmaster

            Re: The Raspberry Pi is already rotten

            At £40 a pop, he'll need to sell 1925 of them before he reaches the current VT threshhold.

  7. Linbox
    FAIL

    Parcelforce = wankers

    I was out when they attempted delivery. I re-arranged for a second attempt on Friday, waited in all day and when it didn't turn up, checked the PF website and they'd inexplicably returned it to RS instead ... Tried ringing RS but "customer services" doesn't cover Pi orders ...

    *sigh*

    It'd better be worth it...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Parcelforce = wankers

      Parcelforce is where they send all the posties that have had complaints made against them or have been caught thieving...

      Anon obviously ;)

  8. Ian Johnston Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    200,000

    What's the Raspberry Pi Foundation correction factor these days? Divide by ten?

    1. James Hughes 1

      Re: 200,000

      Nope. 200k have been sent out. In fact, I think its probably more than that now. With 4k being made per day.

      At a meet on Saturday we sold 50 in about 5 minutes.....

  9. Fishy
    Joke

    Cluster

    Finally you can buy more than one. The plan to build an array - the "Raspberry Pi & Clustard" (TM) is back on.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Re: Cluster

      My Pi-cluster has been christened 'The Punnet'

      I still reckon the cases should be marketed as Pi-crusts, though ;-)

  10. Matt Bucknall
    Flame

    ARM7 and ARMv7 are not the same thing people!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      downvote not for your post, but because the distinction is damned confusing!

  11. IHateWearingATie
    Stop

    Have nothing but respect for the Raspberry Pi guys...

    ... but the retail partner they chose in Farnell was not a good idea. I've been stepping through a sales process since April with more stages than the WRC (register interest, register more interest, pre order, order etc etc) and I still don't have the bloody thing.

    If there is a queue then fine - tell me why there is is a queue ("we're still making them and lots of people want them" is prefectly adequate), tell me my place in the queue (e.g. order 2672 out 10245) and how fast it is diminishing ("we're fulfilling 500 orders a week") and I will be happy.

    Provide me with little or no information and make me step through an overly complicated sales process over several months and I will not be.

    There, feel better now...

  12. Dom 1
    Joke

    For god's sake

    Keep it quiet!

    Raspberry Pi is brilliant, but if we/they shout too loud, Apple will send in the lawyers (in their continued quest to sue everybody on the planet) and get some judge to ban us from having Pi (other than Apple)!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Qt5 on Raspberry Pi

    Incredible (mostly thanks to Qt5)

    YouTube link

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There's room for everyone, people...

    I really can't understand why some folk are getting stroppy over the Raspberry Pi's success (full disclosure: I own one and generally like it, though I have my gripes). There is no law that I know of, banning other companies from making their own ARM boards, and/or improving on the Pi's specs (which the Pi team are quite open in saying was specced for price, not performance).

    In fact, to these "Pi-fighter" ARM boards, I say: bring them on - the more ARM-based computers there are out there, and the more their performance improves, the more people will see that the x86 PC (and the Microsoft OSes which generally run on it) isn't the be-all-and-end-all computing platform (a process already begun with the iPad, tablets, etc.).

    So come on, Gooseberry, VIA APC and every other RasPi-challenging ARM system: join the party and show us what you've got. The computing world's axis is shifting, and as far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: There's room for everyone, people...

      It happens with every electronic device, something else is always better, some people delight in obscureness one-upmanship, the other day I casually mentioned at work that I was going to get a Kindle or an iPad for eBooks, cue outraged howls from some of my workmates that they are not open, won't read this or that format which I never use and the <insert obscure Chinese companies name here> is way better, regardless of the fact only one small shop in the country located 80 miles away sells them.

      Bottom line I couldn't give a damn!, the locked in products of giant profiteering corporate gluttons more than fulfill my needs, and if they go wrong their are plenty of people who know how to fix them or have easy routes to return said items when they fail under warranty.

  15. Chris Evans

    I'll be replacing my Desktop with a Pi!

    I'll be replacing with a Pi, I run RISC OS...

    My Desktop PC is a 233MHz 128MB StrongARM RiscPC and I store most of my files on our server (Another Acorn RiscPC)

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