Gert has just sent me some video of Gertboard, the GPIO expansion board he has developed for Raspberry Pi, working with one of the beta Raspberry Pis and a motor. It’s the best thing I’ve seen all day; and I am in a city with white tigers and fibreglass Venice.
Thanks again to Gert, who is putting such a lot of his time and energy into making Raspberry Pi a success – and thanks to Dom for working on the Linux drivers.
When we started auctioning beta Raspberry Pis to raise money for the charity a few days ago, we imagined each one maybe raising a few hundred quid.
Consider our gast well and truly flabbered.
We are absolutely amazed by the generosity of the people bidding on the beta boards. Every penny from the auction goes straight to our charity, where it will fund the making of more Raspberry Pis to go into schools. We know that those bidding are probably reading this, and we want to say a heartfelt thank you to you all for your support.
Just before Christmas, I took some video in Pete’s factory, where he and Eben were busy making a hand alteration to the beta boards. (The fix has been put in at schematic level now, and won’t be present in the production boards.) You can read here about why we needed to make a change. The area being worked on is around a square mm (so a bit challenging to film, but we managed it). The surface mask on the boards needed scraping off on this area before a blob of solder flux, then solder, was applied to make a bridge between two nets. Here are Pete and Eben scraping the night away on one of the boards we’re auctioning tonight: #3.
Betas #2 and #1 will go up for auction tomorrow.
Eben and I will be in Las Vegas for CES 2012 next week. Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a stand this year; Eben will actually be on the Broadcom stand representing them for his day job during the show itself; and I’m probably not going to be on-site, although I will be somewhere nearby. We will both be available to talk about Raspberry Pi, though, and we’d love to meet some of you if you’re in Vegas.
You can bid for boards 10 and 09 by clicking on the links. I have just got back from an evening of New Year’s carousing, and I’m absolutely overwhelmed by the bids we’ve attracted already – thank you very, very much, everybody. We really weren’t expecting to see this level of interest, and we’re quite humbled by it.
Inevitably, there has been a (pretty minimal, but still very aggravating) screw-up. Boards number 10 and 09 appear to be open to UK bidders only. This is not actually the case, but because I failed miserably to tick one of the eBay interface’s many hundreds of boxes when setting up the auctions, overseas bidders may think they’re not able to put in a bid. It’s fixed for all the other auctions, but because we didn’t notice this before these two went live, we’re stuck with it.
If you’re not in the UK and you would like to bid on board 10 or board 09, you can still bid by using your regular username and password on ebay.co.uk rather than your local eBay site. If you would like to participate and are still having problems, please message us through eBay using the links above – NOT HERE, and we will add you to an exemption list.
Oh – and a happy New Year! I hope the Mayans were wrong, or I’ll have wasted an awful lot of time here.