I’ve got some bad and good news about manufacturing. The bad news is that it’s taking a little longer than we’d hoped, because the factory had some trouble sourcing a specific component. The quartz crystal package we had chosen when we thought we were manufacturing in the UK is readily available over here in Europe, and was the cheapest we could find; but it turns out that in China, that crystal package has been overtaken in price and size by a smaller, cheaper one, so the one we’d designed for has been a bit hard to find. The factory has sourced crystals now, so we’re all go. The good news is that this finally means we have a date for the first batch: the boards will be finished on February 20. Eben and I may be going to China to make sure that the boards can be brought up properly for that date if necessary. We’ll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month.
There’s another big piece of news today. We’ve been leaning (gently and charmingly) on Broadcom, who make BCM2835, the SoC at the heart of the Raspberry Pi, to produce an abbreviated datasheet describing the ARM peripherals in the chip. If you’re a casual user, this won’t be of much interest to you, but if you’re wanting to port your own operating system or just want to understand our Linux kernel sources, this is the document for you. You can download a PDF here. Huge thanks to Gert, JamesH, Gray and Dom for, once again, going above and beyond for us. We really appreciate it.