August | 2012 | Raspberry Pi

Nutjob attempts to extort $35 computer from non-profit foundation

Here’s a (totally unedited except for the addition of some line breaks to make it easier to read) conversation that some guy who managed to get hold of Eben’s email address started with Eben today. We have to laugh, because otherwise we’d be crying; this is an extreme example of a conversation that everybody at the Foundation has at least once a day with someone or other.

Read to the bottom, because it just gets better and better.

Steve: Hello Eben
Sent at 3:46 PM on Friday
Steve: It’s Steve, B.A Applied Math Student
Do you have a minute?
Sent at 3:47 PM on Friday

me: yes

Steve: I wanted to present to my lecturers and administration your computer
I mean the RP
And because I am going to visit my high school too I can show it there too
so if they will be interested then they may buy thousands of units

me: excellent

Steve: Can you please send me sample of model B so they can see it?

me: sorry, I’m afraid we can’t provide free samples

Steve: But what I do is a free advertisement for you
what will I get if they will buy thousands?
Sent at 4:02 PM on Friday
Steve: It doesn’t cost you 30 dollars, show me please where will you
find free advertisement with potential for thousand units to be sold?

me: sorry Steve – it’s foundation policy

Steve: But you are the director
aren’t you?

me: I am indeed

Steve: then you can decide
Sent at 4:06 PM on Friday
Steve: Look I see that my offer doesn’t interest you. I am totally
respect your decision. There is a similar board that is sold and you
can make it a computer too. They told me that I will get a free sample
for ad purposes.

me: understood – which board are you considering using?

Steve: I can give you the name
but I am not interested, only because I should get the samples soon
their project is similar to yours but offers much more options
small board, computer but for large purposes
If you decide to send me the free sample that doesn’t cost you
anything you will get much more.
Sent at 4:11 PM on Friday
Steve: Think that university and a high school and maybe the town I
live in will be interested!
Sent at 4:13 PM on Friday
Steve: If it so difficult for you to send me a sample, to make a
post about this on your blog with a video I will do then I will go to
your competitors who agreed to send me some free samples.
Sent at 4:14 PM on Friday

me: okay, thanks Steve
Sent at 4:17 PM on Friday

Steve: If you don’t mind I will publish that conversation to some
press because we were interested how friendly you are to new potential
customers.
Sent at 4:18 PM on Friday
Steve: Eben, I have been second ago with the IT admin who was
interested in your product. He asked me to talk to you and ask for a
sample.
Sent at 4:20 PM on Friday

me: I’m sorry Steve, I can’t help you with this.
Sent at 4:25 PM on Friday

At this point, Eben closes the conversation window. But Steve is not put off:

Steve: Hello Eben
Steve: I think you can but for some strange reason can’t even try to
send me a sample. If you wanted to, I am sure you could find the way
to send it.
Sent at 4:41 PM on Friday
Steve: Meanwhile we are contacting the inventor of the board I
mentioned before and I think we will buy the boards from him. You have
a great customer service

me: okay, best of luck with your project

Steve: First time I get such customer service, even Samsung sent us
some equipment for free before we bought it.
Sent at 4:44 PM on Friday
Steve: Maybe be some comments and youtube video we will upload along
with a coverage in press will show you how to treat potential
customers.

me: that’s certainly a possibility

Steve: What did we ask from your company?
To send a sample
that’s all
It’s worldwide practice before buying to send a sample.
Sent at 4:47 PM on Friday
Steve: I thought I am talking to a company who knows about worldwide
standards and treats people who may transfer thousands and hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
We are amused here, all of us

me: understood

Steve: And what does it mean?
We don’t need your understanding we want to know what is the reason
not to send a sample.
Sent at 4:50 PM on Friday
Steve: You are the director. You can order your people to send us
the sample as ad. compaign.
campaign*
Sent at 4:52 PM on Friday

me: I can, but I don’t see anything to indicate that sending you a
sample will result in sales of enough units to cover the cost of the
sample

Steve: What do you want to get if you will send the sample?
Sent at 4:53 PM on Friday

me: I would need to be convinced that there is a credible prospect
of a significant number of sales.

Steve: Ok but if you will send me this sample
I will show it in my university and high school
Firstly they need to connect it and see what they can do with it.
To test it in various laboratories.
And to see if it is good enough.
If yes, lecturers have grants and they can buy your product.

me: I understand the pitch, I’m just not interested, sorry. The
foundation doesn’t send out free units.

Steve: Why?
It’s a worldwide practice.
So you confirm you don’t want to have a potential customers who will
buy like 2000-3000 units?
Sent at 5:00 PM on Friday
Steve: Your answer please
So you confirm you don’t want to have a potential customers who will
buy like 2000-3000 units?
Sent at 5:03 PM on Friday
Steve: Eben?
So you confirm you don’t want to have a potential customers who will
buy like 2000-3000 units?

me: we’re absolutely interested in customers of that sort

Steve: And I can give you such customers

me: however, they tend to be prepared to pay $35 for a trial unit first

Steve: if you will send me a sample they should buy the amount.
But you are keeping to be on your position and lose such customers -
those who can hear from me about your product
Sent at 5:06 PM on Friday
Steve: I the places I have been to including the army there is a
need in such devices, but I am not going to show or tell about your
product if I will not get the sample. It’s a payment for me to do
this.
In*

me: I appreciate that

Steve: Don’t you think you should grant me with a sample for my hard
work to tell and advertise your product?

me: no

Steve: Don’t answer me such answers, I am a journalist who works for
a newspaper in New York
Do you really want me to post that you refused to have customers and
didn’t want to grant a good guy who advertised your product?

me: I suspect that demanding free product in return for positive
coverage in a newspaper might be considered ethically dubious in most
countries

Steve: Maybe because I am Jewish
Now I get the point, you don’t want to do it because of my nationality.
Sent at 5:11 PM on Friday
Steve: This was the reason and now I understand it. I am totally
shocked and I will cover the real reason for your refuse.

me: classy

Steve: “Eben Upton refused to have deal with Jews”
I think I will add some and write a great coverage about the customer
service of the director of RP
Sent at 5:16 PM on Friday

me: that’s certainly an eyecatching headline

Steve: I see you want me to publish it
ok, as you wish
Sent at 5:18 PM on Friday

me: thanks for your time

Steve: You have taken time from me
Hope my coverage will hurt your sells
Maybe then you will talk in a different manner
Sent at 5:20 PM on Friday

Eben at PopTech

We were in Iceland a couple of months ago for the PopTech conference on resilience, where Eben was presenting. Many of you have asked us for video of the talk; it was just made available today. Enjoy!

Starting a business with a Raspberry Pi

We’re now reaching a point where people’s Raspberry Pi business ideas are starting to appear in the wild. The Pi’s strength for these entrepreneurial types is its price; before Pi, if you were, say, setting up a digital display business, you’d be spending a whole heap more than $35 on the device that drives each of your displays.

Here’s a really cute example of the sort of thing the Raspberry Pi makes possible for people to produce at an affordable price. It’s the Shoop!, a Pi-powered souvenir photo printer. Brian de la Cruz, the maker, calls it a photo studio in a box.

If, like Brian, you’re making a product which requires a Raspberry Pi to run, we don’t ask you to buy special permission or licences from us to use it. All we ask is that you include the words “Powered by Raspberry Pi” somewhere on your packaging. If your business is successful, we’d be very grateful if you could consider donating a small portion of your profits to the Raspberry Pi Foundation – but that’s all, and if you choose not to do that, that’s fine too.

I get several emails every day about people’s projects, many of which I’m asked not to talk about here until they’re a bit more mature so that people can protect their ideas. It’s exciting stuff, and it’s fantastic for us to be able to watch you guys grow your businesses. We love this stuff: we’ve said a million times that we believe that the world keeps on spinning because of entrepreneurship, and it’s great to see people pick up the Pi and run with it.

Making things is not the only way you can set up a business with the Raspberry Pi. Have a quick look at this snapshot of Ryan Walmsley’s Rastrack map, taken today (about one in every 40 owners has registered the location of their Pi – add yours if you want to help add more granularity). Click through to go to the map yourself if you want to zoom in and find out how many have been registered in your town. And then read on.

Click to visit Rastrack

There’s something interesting about the dispersal pattern here. The Anglosphere (as Eben insists on calling it) seems to have caught on to the Pi idea now. But there are big countries out there – Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, India and many others – where there’s demand for the Raspberry Pi (we know because we get many, many, many emails from these countries every day), but not much Pi penetration.

There are several reasons for this: alarming taxes on courier service more than double the cost of the Pi in some countries; import taxes in some places are prohibitive (I’m not sure what we can do about that); in others, there’s not really a way for people to buy online easily. Some countries have very little internet coverage; others have a population that doesn’t have access to credit cards or even bank accounts. We’re going to be taking someone on next year to work exclusively with getting the Raspberry Pi into these areas – work that we’ll be doing with other charities and NGOs. But if you’re someone who lives in one of those countries, there are things that you can do right now to help (with the side effect of making some money for yourself) too.

Now that it’s possible to order Raspberry Pis in bulk, we’re encouraging enterprising types in those countries to buy Pis (see the links at the top right of the main page) to resell in bricks and mortar shops. If you buy in bulk you’ll make very big savings on shipping; while it’s not possible to get bulk discounts on the Raspberry Pi (our business model has Farnell and RS selling the device at the lowest price possible for single and multiple units), you can set your own price – and selling the Raspberry Pi is a great way to get people to buy peripherals, books and cases from you too.

If you’re making a Raspberry Pi product, please mail us. We’d love to see what you’re doing.

So: what can I do with those video codecs?

We’ve had a few people ask exactly what they can do with the new MPEG-2 and VC-1 licences we made available last week for download. As usual, the community is scarily on top of things here and has done our job for us. Ian Dixon has compiled a blog post with a very useful table and some video, showing you exactly what video formats you can play on your Raspberry Pi with an MPEG-2 and VC-1 licence if you weren’t quite sure where to start.

Thanks very much, Ian!

Another game from Philip (aged nearly eight)

I’m starting to think we should be giving this kid a weekly spot. Now, I’m having to rush around a bit today, so won’t have time for a screed of text for you; instead, here’s Philip’s third game in Scratch.

What we’re really enjoying about Philip’s videos is the way the games are getting a little more sophisticated each time. I’ve encouraged him to submit his code in our Summer Programming Competition – there are only a few days to go for you to get your entries in, and a lot of you seem to have been spending your summer writing stuff for us. Get cracking with the entry form if you haven’t already!

Music hacks, Raspberry Pi synthesiser

We’ve spent the last few days at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh. And the best thing we did (that party with the free whisky and the accelerometer-jousting aside) was visiting Music Hack Scotland, where we saw some pretty amazing hacks being produced at the closing show-and-tell. Favourites? Electronics newbie Annie’s hand-soldered metronome (a kick-ass demonstration that soldering is easy); the Raspberry Pi-driven soft toy/guitar hybrid (The Ducktar – I’m hoping for some video from the makers if they find some time); and an ambient music-generating unicycle.

There’s another music hack in Iceland in a couple of months. Eben and I are currently juggling our schedules to try to make it out there for the event; the hacker community in Reykjavik are some of the nicest folks we’ve met since we’ve been doing this, and the music hack promises to be another brilliant weekend.

Meanwhile, back in England…

Piana graphical user interface

When we got home, head full of ideas about encouraging people to port Max to the Raspberry Pi, we found a mail waiting for us from Omenie, one of our forum members. I really wish we’d known about this before Music Hack Scotland. He’s building a virtual analogue synthesiser called Piana (geddit?) with the Raspberry Pi, and it is absolutely one of the most exciting bits of work-in-progress I’ve seen being done with the Pi so far. (Full disclosure: a Raspberry Pi being used as a synthesiser is perfectly calculated to press all my buttons. I love it.)

Omenie says:

Later than anticipated, please check out a Raspberry Pi being – and I do not exaggerate – the best-sounding synth I’ve ever played with for under £500, never mind under £50. It was a hideous effort to get even 4 note polyphony out of it, am hoping to still get 8 by more aggressive tuning although guts have already been bust.

He’s blogging about Piana’s progress, and things are moving fast, so if you’re interested, it’s well worth checking in regularly. I hope we’ll be featuring Piana more here too as she becomes more mature. Thanks Omenie; we look forward to seeing and hearing more from you!

Stuff Gadget Awards – please vote Pi!

We’ve been nominated for another award, and we’d really appreciate it if you could take a few moments to register a vote for Raspberry Pi. There are three categories in Stuff magazine’s annual awards which are voted for by the public: Innovation of the Year, Game of the Year, Most Wanted Future Gadget and Design of the Year. We’re up for Innovation of the Year.

Thanks for voting!

Reminder: Summer programming contest entries close on Saturday!

We hope those of you lucky enough to be 18 or under have been working hard on your entries for our Summer Programming Contest. Just a quick reminder that the deadline for entries is this coming Saturday, 1 September, at 9am BST. Don’t be late!

New video features! MPEG-2 and VC-1 decode, H.264 encode, CEC support

If you’ve been following this website since we launched it last summer, you’ll probably be aware that we had to make some hard decisions about exactly what we could include on the Raspberry Pi if we were to meet our extremely low target price. One of the things that we had to regretfully dismiss as an option was an MPEG-2 decode licence for every unit. Providing that licence would have raised the price of every Raspberry Pi by roughly 10%, and we simply weren’t able to justify that when we held it up against the educational goals of the Foundation. Our initial expectation was that most of you would buy the Raspberry Pi for educational purposes, and that you wouldn’t mind that MPEG-2 wasn’t available. Our bad.

MPEG-2 and VC-1 decode

Thing is, a bunch of you went and bought the Raspberry Pi in February and immediately started using it as your primary media centre. And many, many of you have existing media libraries which are encoded using MPEG-2, and don’t fancy transcoding gigabites of stuff to H.264. You’ve been complaining about that. Vociferously.

We’ve spent some months working out how on earth to square this particular circle. A blanket licence for everybody would cost the Foundation money it simply doesn’t have, and not everybody with a Raspberry Pi would use that licence; an individual licence for an individual user to download and use with an individual machine is a surprisingly finickity thing to engineer. (This is why we’re very grateful to have Dom on board our engineering team, because he’s clever.) But that’s what we’ve done – so from today, you’ll be able to purchase an MPEG-2 decode licence which will be tied to your Raspberry Pi’s unique serial number. This will allow you to play MPEG-2 material from XBMC and omxplayer, which hasn’t been an available feature before now.

To purchase an MPEG-2 licence visit our (relaunched) store. And before you mention it in the comments, yes, stickers, t-shirts and other merchandise will be available, but not until we’ve built up a staff to handle it, which will take up a few months. Eben and I quickly realised earlier this year that if we keep gumming the envelopes and sticking on labels for this stuff ourselves, we will die from papercuts and boredom in very short order – and nothing else will get done because we’ll be very gluey.

We have also made a VC-1 licence available for purchase in the store. This is Microsoft’s video codec, and we don’t expect as many of you to require it as require MPEG-2, but there is a significant volume of material out there in this format which we thought it’d be nice to have the option to view on the Raspberry Pi.

You will receive your key by email within 72 hours of ordering. We haven’t been able to integrate key generation with the store website, so we will be generating them offline and sending them out automatically.

H.264 encode

Alongside MPEG-2 support (which you’ll have to pay for), we’re making H.264 encode available for free. The hardware has always been capable of supporting H.264 encode, but we were under the misapprehension that encode required an additional licence fee, so were waiting until the camera board release (which is still coming later in the year) before spending the money to enable it.

During the course of talking to the MPEG LA about the MPEG-2 licence, we discovered that the existing licence fee that is already baked into the cost of the Raspberry Pi actually covers both encode and decode – I tell you, this stuff is arcane - so we’ve enabled the relevant OpenMAX components by default in the latest firmware. It may take a while for someone to produce an encoder application which uses these components, but once they do you should be able to use the Pi as a standalone transcoder.

CEC support

Recent versions of Raspbmc, XBian and OpenELEC (the OpenELEC site was down as of the time of writing, but should be back soon) now include CEC support. Before I go any further, here’s a video explaining what that’s all about.

This video’s both a demonstration and a tutorial; for the home user, the thing you’re going to find the most useful is the ability to use your remote control to control both your TV and your Raspberry Pi and any other connected devices, without having to do any fiddling with software or hardware or having to buy anything extra like adapters or dongles.

The video’s subtitled with very helpful tips which will get you set up within minutes. The Pulse-Eight guys (whose blog you should read if you want more details) and Patrick Loo at Broadcom have done a huge amount of work on this, and it really shows; it’s a lovely smooth, easy user experience which I think you’ll really like.

Phew.

Wednesday grab bag

Eben and I are travelling to Edinburgh today for the Turing Festival, a technology festival that runs at the same time as the Edinburgh Festival. Eben’s giving a talk on education and technology on Saturday; we’re very excited to be at the same event as Steve Wozniak, and hope to be eating many square sausages and black puddings.

So we’ll be rather absent from the internet today, because Edinburgh’s a long way away from Cambridge. Here are some bits and pieces to keep you occupied.

Maplin bundle

Maplin Raspberry Pi bundle. Click image to pre-order.

Maplin, the UK electronics company, are selling a Raspberry Pi bundle, which includes a Raspberry Pi and all the peripherals you might need to get started, from September. You can pre-order now if you want to get ahead of the crowd (orders are first-come, first-served), and they’ll arrive in stores next month. We think the kit will make a great Christmas present, especially if you know any young people who might have trouble rustling up things like wi-fi dongles and USB hubs on their own. For £69 you’ll get a Raspberry Pi, keyboard and mouse, an SD card pre-loaded with Raspbian, a powered USB hub, HDMI and USB cables, a power supply and a wi-fi dongle.

Super Turkey

Seven-year-old Philip, whom you may remember from last week, has spent another week programming in Scratch with his Raspberry Pi and has another game to show us. Dad tells me that Philip’s plush parrot, who features heavily in this video, doesn’t have a name yet: please leave suggestions in the comments!

We can’t get enough of videos and pictures like this at the Foundation. If you’re a proud parent with a Raspberry Pi-wielding kid, or if you’re a kid yourself, and you’ve got video or pictures you’d like us to share on this website, please mail me at liz@raspberrypi.org – we really like to remind ourselves and everybody else that this sort of thing is what the Raspberry Pi project is all about.

And some grown-ups have been working on stuff too…

You may have already read about Dave Hunt’s DSLR hack – it went viral last week. He’s embedded a Raspberry Pi in a camera battery grip, which allows him to wirelessly tether his camera to…well, whatever he’s got on his network. He’s been automatically pushing pictures to other devices, controlling the camera with networked objects (a smartphone, a PC), making it respond to a remote trigger, auto-saving pictures to a USB drive – the Raspberry Pi also works as an intervalometer, and he can use it to program aperture and exposure settings. He’s got big ideas for further development, too, with plans for an additional screen and an internal power supply. Here’s a video of the camera sending images to an iPad, with some example Perl script.

Off-the-shelf DSLR cameras with these kinds of functions typically run into the many thousands of pounds. Dave’s done it all with a $35 Raspberry Pi. More power to your thrifty, imaginative elbow, Dave.

And have you come across Nixie clocks? These cold-cathode tube clocks have been a bit of a web fetish for a little while now, but this one, from Martin Oldfield, is the first one I’ve seen being driven by a Raspberry Pi. I’m going to hack one of these together myself when I get some time; it’s a lovely looking thing, and putting one together at home is simpler than you’d think.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a Cherry G80-3000 keyboard (one of those fabulous mechanical keyboards with a lovely clicky action, like my now-deceased IBM Model M but from this decade) has been hacked to contain a Raspberry Pi, hidden in some space under the function keys – a whole computer in a keyboard. I feel like we’ve seen this kind of thing before.

Please spread this Jam

The Raspberry Jams continue around the world – Milton Keynes, Bristol and Melbourne, Australia (which happened very shortly before I wrote this post on Tuesday night, so I don’t have any bloggy links about it yet), have seen Jams in the last few days. These events are a great way to meet other Raspberry Pi users, get a start if you’re a kid or just a grown-up who wants to learn about programming and electronics, and to show off your projects.

Raspberry Pi and something much bigger. (It's an evaluation board from Heber, who sponsored the Bristol Raspberry Jam.)

Our good friend Alan “Teknoteacher” Donohoe, who does a phenomenal amount of work organising and promoting the Jams, maintains a page describing where and when all the Jams across the world are being held. We’re seeing venues as small as local cafes and venues as large as university auditoriums being used for groups of all sizes, and people aged from 14 to 70 setting the events up. The list is growing all the time; if there isn’t one near you yet, why not set one up yourself?