I don’t usually post links to media stories about Raspberry Pi here, but today’s article in The Register was so good and so informative that I thought it’d be a shame to leave it hidden away in the news section of the forums.
We’re getting lots of email today, having been on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme (audio link at top right) and mentioned in the Next Gen report this morning. Things are moving very fast here at Raspberry Towers; this looks like being an interesting week!
I’ve winkled the details of the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pinout out of the hardware guys: no pretty pictures in this post, but a lovely information dump that those of you who solder for fun will enjoy getting your teeth into.
Top row, left to right:
5V0
DNC
GND
TXD
RXD
GPIO1
DNC
GPIO4
GPIO5
DNC
GPIO6
SPI_CE0_N
SPI_CE1_N
Bottom row, left to right:
3V3
SDA0
SCL0
GPIO7
DNC
GPIO0
GPIO2
GPIO3
DNC
SPI_MOSI
SPI_MISO
SPI_SCLK
DNC
Notes:
- all the UART, SPI and I2C pins can be reconfigured as GPIO if needed.
- some of the do-not-connect (DNC) pins will likely be replaced by
GPIO in a subsequent board revision.
We will not be making the boards with pins in place, in order to shave some cost off the build; you’ll have to solder them on yourself. I have to add the usual legal warning here that this pinout is provisional, subject to change if we decide something’s wrong or not optimal, and all that jazz. The likelihood of any changes is very small indeed, but do be aware that it’s there if you are using this information to build any add-on hardware before you get your hands on a Raspberry Pi.
Thanks to Paul Beech for this and some other spectacularly lovely design work we’ll be showing you soon. We’re using this diagram on handouts and posters at the moment, and it’s going down a treat.
You’ll have seen quite a buzz here about Qt on Raspberry Pi, alongside some of the prettiest demos that have been submitted to us so far. At next week’s Qt Dev Days in San Francisco, developers will have a chance to play with one of the few alpha boards in the wild. Nokia are one of our partners, and have done a large amount of engineering on this, convincing us that Qt’s a really good fit for the platform while they’re at it. They’ve negotiated with us to guarantee to sell them 400 beta boards when we start to ship. They’re going to be giving those boards away to Qt 5 developers who are willing to port software, develop apps, and test and improve the Qt 5 Linux stack. You don’t need to attend Qt Dev Days to qualify, but you do need to be a verifiable Qt developer with some idea of what you’re wanting to do with the board.
If you’re a Qt developer who wants to get their hands on a free board (I’m looking at you, team Tampere), visit Nokia’s Qt blog to find out how to apply.
Some of you may be wondering where your stickers have got to. After we ran out of the initial batch last week, we placed an order with our suppliers for a much larger batch, with a projected delivery date of this Wednesday. For reasons beyond our control, this has now slipped to this coming Monday.
As a result, some people have now been waiting a week for us to fulfil their order, including a minority who ordered before we changed the product status from “in stock” to “pre-order”. We want your goodwill much more than your money, so if you’re one of these people and would like us to cancel your order, please contact us at store@raspberrypi.org and we’ll get right on it. Otherwise, we expect to fulfil all outstanding orders on Monday.
And yes, this is exactly the sort of thing we don’t want to happen when we launch the device.
Attentive readers of our forum may have seen our friend Vgrade, who has been doing development on one of the alpha boards, post a video of a little distribution he built on Mer, with QtCreator (which is indeed cute) installed, a couple of days ago. Mer’s light footprint makes it ideal for use on the Raspberry Pi, and you may have seen some of the Qt demos we’ve been showcasing on this blog. With this package (all open source, of course) you’ll be able to use the Raspberry Pi to write software in Qt and QML.
Vgrade has just released the files on his website with installation instructions (scroll to the bottom of his post for the download). If you’ve got an SD card going spare at home, you might want to copy these files to it and get your Raspberry Pi distro library off to a good start before we ship next month.
As promised, here are the Gerbers (a visualisation of the printed circuit board or PCB) for the finalised version of the Raspberry Pi. I get several messages every day asking what it can possibly be that we are still working on: I hope you will understand on looking at this why the routing, which has to be quite spectacularly complicated to minimise expensive PCB features and to keep things tiny, took as long as it did! That snarl in the middle is the signal escape for the BCM2835, the chip at the heart of the Raspi. The elves have been working overtime.
Raspberry Pi Gerbers - click to embiggen
The Raspberry Pi is exactly the size of a credit card – 85.60mm x 53.98mm. You can’t tell where the ports are from this picture, but I should have measurements and precise placements for you next week some time (Pete Lomas, who has done the insanely fiddly work on this, is away for the week for some richly deserved time away from Pi and to try to recover what’s left of his eyesight).
This design is almost certain not to change, but we have to reserve the right to make changes if the boards are poorly yielding in manufacture – so please be aware of this if you’re making a case now. We’re in the process of making a very small initial test run of what you see above (to preempt the obvious question, no, you can’t buy one), and will move to larger production when we’re happy that there are no early-life bugs. Because we can’t predict whether or not there will be any, we can’t give you a firm release date, but Pete has engineered what you see here nigh unto death, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for an easy ride.
See if you can guess what my desktop wallpaper is now!
Edited to add: One of our forum members has mocked up a 1:1 scale card model of the board, and put it next to a quarter for scale, with some components like those you’ll see on the real board laid on top. Drop into the forums to have a look and to get a feel for the size of the real thing.
Just a quick note for those of you who are able to listen to BBC Radio 4: Eben recorded an interview for Click On at the London Hackspace last week, which will be broadcast at 4.30pm this afternoon. Hope you can listen in! The BBC usually makes recordings available within 24 hours of broadcast, so the link above should have audio from some time tomorrow if you missed the show.
Don’t skip straight to the Raspberry Pi bit (which starts at 6:00); the piece about the London Hackspace is also really interesting, and well worth a listen.
Update: I can’t believe this, but you guys bought all our stickers in under 24 hours. Thank you for your generosity! I’ve ordered another (larger) batch, which should be with us on Wednesday Nov 16. I’ll post here when they’re available again.
Update 2: We’ve set up pre-orders for the second batch of stickers, so you can order them now, although we won’t be able to post then until next week. Get clicking!
We’re testing the back-end behind our new online shop, and raising a bit of money for the day-to-day running of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The only product in the store at the moment is a teeny-tiny sticker, which we’re selling at an exorbitant cost to raise funds for the charity – really, we’re asking you to make a donation of £1 (plus shipping, and VAT where appropriate), in return for which we’ll send you a fancy Raspberry Pi vinyl sticker, cut to the shape of the logo. It’s just the right size to stick over your Windows key (it’s got a special coating for high-abrasion environments, so should put up with your pressing the Windows key a reasonable amount). It’s a nice fit on a Raspberry Pi case, over the SD card slot if you decide not to use a case, in the corner of your monitor, on your microwave – go wild! I have 1,000 in stock at the moment. If they look like they’re selling well, I’ll order some more. T-shirts are also in the works for when we’ve got fulfilment completely set up.
Raspberry Pi stickers - get them while they're hot!
Given we like to do things as transparently as possible, I should explain why we’re starting the shop off like this, selling something small, before we start selling the Raspberry Pi itself. We’re using the stickers to test a number of things. We’re checking the practicality of PayPal as a payment method and as a way of processing credit cards; we’re testing our shipping calculations for parcels; we’re ensuring that the shop software’s output of labels is acceptable; and we’re looking at inventory tracking. We figured the best way to do this was by selling something very low-value and very small. Hence stickers.
Initially, we’re using the Royal Mail to fulfil orders. We will eventually be changing over to a carrier with who will do warehousing for us too, and using them instead of the Post Office to send you your items, but while we’re only selling stickers as a test run, it doesn’t make sense for us to spend money on warehouse space we won’t be using.
We can only set the store software up to handle parcels, so it’s charging the parcel fee although that’s not what we’re paying. The postage fee we’re actually paying in the UK, for example, is the 46p it costs for a 1st class stamp. Sorry about that – there isn’t anything we can do about it. I’m actually stuffing the envelopes, sticking labels on and posting them myself, so any money above the cost of postage and cost of the sticker and envelope is going straight to the charity.
It’s just been drawn to our attention that there’s a Russian site [link removed] purporting to be an official reseller, which is already offering preorders. We’re sending a takedown notice (although I’m not sure how much traction that will get).
If you see a site offering preorders or claiming to be an official reseller at the moment, it’s a fake. Please don’t send them your money. Initially, this site will be the only place you can buy a Raspberry Pi, and we are not offering preorders.
If any Russian readers would like to spread the word on social networking sites, we’d be very grateful! We’d hate to see people lose their money to a scammer.
Edit, Nov 9: The site in question has taken down its online store.