element14 | Raspberry Pi

RasPi.tv goes whackadoodle with a Gertboard and a Wiimote

Alex Eames from RasPi.tv has really outdone himself this time: he’s using a Wiimote and a Gertboard to make his Pi control a splendid array of motors and solenoids, complete with little flags and metal teacups that go ping. More flap-whizz-ding-vroom to your elbow, Alex. This is one of the best Gertboard demos I’ve seen so far. You can read more at RasPi.tv.

Gertboard is, of course, produced by Gert van Loo, one of the volunteer engineers who has given a huge amount of his spare time in doing Pi work over the last couple of years; he designed the large beta boards we used to develop the final Raspberry Pi that you’ve got on your desk right now, he works on the camera board, and he knows more about stepper motors than is strictly healthy. (Because Gert is not employed by the Foundation, you’ll occasionally find him in the comments and the forums here saying stuff like: “I am not part of the Foundation! I just help.” This is total nonsense; we wouldn’t have a Pi without Gert, and I’m pretty sure he knows it.)

The Gertboard is an expansion board for physical computing-types, making your Pi a powerful piece of kit in the real world: you can use it to detect and respond to external physical events, detect and output analogue voltages, drive powerful motors, detect switch presses, flash LEDs and drive relays.You can buy one from element14. (It also comes with a very fine manual which you can download for free from the product page.)

I’m hoping to meet Alex from Raspi.tv at Oxford Geek Night on March 13, when Eben and I will be dropping by for beers, a talk, and chat. The guys behind Manuel, the talking moose, and plenty of other Pi hackers will be there – I hope some more of you will join us!

Assembled Gertboards available

Farnell have just announced that they have stock of assembled Gertboards. We’ve seen them on element14 and on Farnell: at the time of writing, 1600 of them were available for £30. For more about Gertboard, see our previous posts. Then head on over and order one!

Twelve Pis of Christmas: Farnell

Another day, another auction. Today’s Raspberry Pi pre-production Model A bundle is being auctioned for our distributor Premier Farnell/element14′s choice of charity, Take Heart. Take Heart is very special to Farnell – it’s a small local charity very close to their headquarters in Leeds, founded by former patients of the Yorkshire Heart Centre at Leeds General Infirmary and St James Hospital, which raises money to benefit current patients, relatives and staff at the YHC.

Take Heart’s stall at the Leeds General Infimary: click to bid on their Pi!

Today’s auction looks a little different from the previous ones because Take Heart is not listed with Missionfish, eBay’s nonprofit fundraising centre. (A couple of the other organisations we’re going to be donating to aren’t either.) Every penny raised will still be going to the charity.

Made in the UK!

There’s a little bit of news about what’s new with the Rev2 board design we posted about yesterday that we saved for today.

Look carefully (click to enlarge). Alongside the obvious differences like the mounting holes, there are a few words along the short side on the right you might want to read. Many thanks to makeamillion.de (Homwer on our forums), who got his hands on this when the news was still embargoed but kept quiet about it - and took this very fine photo for us.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll remember the time last year when we had to make the decision to manufacture the Raspberry Pi in China. The Raspberry Pi is a British enterprise, and as well as improving things in the computing industry’s future here by educating kids, we wanted to improve things in the present too, by actually doing our manufacture here in the UK.

Last year, when nobody had heard of the Raspberry Pi, we had been unable to find a British manufacturer whose prices per unit (especially at a point where we were thinking of sales in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands you’re seeing now) would work for us, and who believed that the project would be enough of a success for them to risk line space for us. There was just no way to make the Raspberry Pi in the UK and keep the price at $25 for the Model A (which will be released before the end of the year at the promised price) and $35 for the Model B.

Happily, things change.

Back at the beginning of April, Eben and I paid a visit to Sony’s UK manufacturing plant in Pencoed, South Wales. Several meetings, a factory tour, a lot of phone calls, some PowerPoint and sandwiches, and an up-close-and-personal with a wave soldering machine later, we were able to introduce our manufacturing and distributing partners to Sony’s Welsh facility, where, as well as making Sony products, Sony’s team undertakes contract electronic manufacture (CEM). It’s an incredibly impressive affair; the quietest, pleasantest plant I’ve ever been in, all comfortable lighting, ergonomic workspaces, cool air and relaxed staff. Sony’s quality control system is legendary, their ability to manufacture fast and cleanly is superb, and they’ve already invested in adding PoP (Package on Package – the fiddly stuff where the Broadcom chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi is stacked beneath the RAM chip) hardware manufacture ability and expansion capability just for us. They’re also able to take on the huge task (currently undertaken by RS and Farnell) of ensuring the parts used are sourced ethically and to the highest ecological standards – every component has to pass standard compliance via Sony’s Green Management programme.

The upshot of all this? Element14/Premier Farnell have made the decision to move the bulk of their Raspberry Pi manufacture to South Wales. Moving manufacture like this is an enormous undertaking; from the start of the process, it’s taken us (especially Pete), Farnell and Sony nearly six months to get all our respective ducks in a row. The initial contract will see the Pencoed plant producing 30,000 Raspberry Pis a month, and creating around 30 new jobs.

How do you know if you’ve got a UK-made board? Easy. Look next to the power jack; you’ll see the words “Made in the UK”. We couldn’t be prouder.

Gertboard is here!

If you’re a regular on this website, you’ll be familiar with this name. Gert van Loo, an all-round good egg and upstanding gentleman, designed the original alpha hardware that the Raspberry Pi Model B is based on. Many of you will be aware of the Gertboard, a little add-on board designed by Gert for the Raspberry Pi, which expands the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins and will allow you to interface with the outside world.

Gertboard is now available exclusively through element14 (UK link) – you should be able to find it on your local element14 website. For Singapore and other Asia Pacific countries please order here; for Australia, please order here; for the USA please order here.

Gertboard (left) and a Raspberry Pi - photograph courtesy of element14

If you want to use your Raspberry Pi to drive motors to open doors, lift things, or power robotics; if you want to sense temperature and switch devices on and off; if you want to flash lights; if you want to teach it to play the glockenspiel; or if you want to learn about electronics from scratch, then Gertboard is for you. (This is the stuff I’m talking about when I blither on about physical computing here.) It comes with an assembly manual and a user manual (both of the above are direct download links to PDFs), which also act as a pair of teaching guides, bundled with plenty of programs to show you how to put things together.

Gertboard is packaged as a kit. It doesn’t come preassembled; you will have to solder it together yourself. Soldering is easy, as we’ve said before (seriously – if I can solder, so can you), and we encourage you to have a go. If you make mistakes they’re easy to correct, and once you’ve finished building your Gertboard you’ll have a very useful piece of hardware, a new skill, and a lovely warm sense of achievement.

Gertboard isn’t an official Raspberry Pi Foundation product, but it’s designed and produced by someone who’s right at the heart of the Foundation, it fits the Foundation’s goals perfectly, and we endorse it wholeheartedly; we hope to see lots of kids using it as a learning platform along with the Raspberry Pi. Go and preorder one now (lead times should be short); they’re only £30, and I predict they’re going to go like hot cakes.

Gert will be answering questions below later today, so pile into the comments if there’s anything you’d like to ask.

Want to buy more than one Raspberry Pi? Now you can!

Up until now, we’ve had to restrict purchases of the Raspberry Pi to one per customer because the demand has been (and continues to be) so high. Both of our manufacturing partners have been working at building capacity so you we can lift that limit – right now, 4000 Raspberry Pis are being made every day. As of this morning, you’ll be able to buy as many Raspberry Pis as you want from both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell. (See below for ordering instructions.)

This is of special importance to those of you who are using the Raspberry Pi in your businesses, and to people looking to buy classroom sets for schools and universities. And if you’ve been waiting for the Raspberry Pi to be in general delivery before you order, now’s the time to get your order in; it helps us to plan the supply chain efficiently if we have a bit of visibility of what’s just down the road.

Jo from RS says:

We’re delighted to announce that as of 08.30am BST on 16th July, RS and Allied are now taking general orders for Raspberry Pi. Orders can be placed by visiting http://pi.rsdelivers.com.

This means that customers worldwide can now order multiple quantities of the Raspberry Pi Model B board, along with the associated accessories, including SD cards pre-loaded with the latest Raspberry Pi operating system and Raspberry Pi cases for safer storage. Customers will be provided with a forecast future delivery date when placing their order, and these orders will be fulfilled after all orders placed before 16th July have been shipped.

We’ve opened up the RS and Allied websites so that businesses, engineering professionals and educational institutions can now place their Raspberry Pi order through our usual business-to-business channels. Anyone who wants to buy the Raspberry Pi for personal use will be directed to the Pi Store to make their purchase.

While existing orders for Raspberry Pi will continue to be fulfilled through the next few months, the ramp-up of production has enabled us to lift the restrictions on the number of units per customer. Orders can now be placed for unlimited quantities of Raspberry Pi board and accessories without the need to register or to receive an invitation to order. We’re currently forecasting that these orders will start reaching customers by the end of September.

The Raspberry Pi boards from RS and Allied are priced at £21.60, plus tax, shipping charges and import duty as applicable.

Jenny from Farnell says:

element14 are pleased to announce that we will now be taking volume orders for Raspberry Pi Model B, on an expected delivery lead-time of 4-6 weeks, as our order backlog improves and our production capacity continues to increase.

Anyone wishing to purchase 10 or more Raspberry Pi’s should email rpiquotes@element14.com for the very latest delivery information.

These orders will be serviced and delivered in the date order that they’re taken, and will not impact any deliveries already committed to other customers.

Now form an orderly line!

Ben Heck’s Raspberry Pi case (which looks suspiciously like a BBC Micro…)

We met Ben, King of the Modders, at Maker Faire back in May. He’s a stand-up chap, and took a Raspberry Pi home with him. Here’s what he did with it.

It flips up like a writing desk so you can keep things inside it, it's got a slot for "cartridges" (which you can also hack together at home) - I wish my Beeb had come with all these bells and whistles.

Here’s the episode of element14′s Ben Heck show which shows you what to do. Files for the case itself are available too; you’ll need to use a laser cutter, which is a great excuse to join a local Make Space, Hackspace or another hackers collective (there’s a large and growing list of where you can find such things at hackerspaces.org). element14 are also running a competition which closes August 18, where you can win the case featured in these pics and video. Thanks Ben – we love it. I hope we can get together again soon!

OK – I lied. THIS is the final video from Maker Faire.

Turned out that George from element14 still had another video up his sleeve. This really is the last one: a short Q&A with Eben and me about the Foundation. I am, as some bright spark will doubtless point out in the comments, really really awkward in front of cameras (which is why you don’t ordinarily get to see much of me). And very short.

You asked, Eben answered!

You might be one of the people who took part in the #AskEben questions on Twitter and YouTube last week. Here are Eben’s answers, kindly filmed and edited in a rock-and-roll style by the muscly George from element14.

These are worth a watch. They’re not the questions we usually get asked around here, a few of them had me choking on my glass of water with either horror or laughter, and some of you (UKScone, Romilly) might recognise your questions on the list.

Maker Faire: Raspberry Pi panel with Eben, Matt Richardson and Ben Heck

The first of this weekend’s talks is now available online: here’s Eben in a panel discussion about Raspberry Pi with the most excellent Matt Richardson from Make, and Ben Heck, the modder king. There’s more material from the Faire to come, so watch this space!

Maker Movement Heads to the Classroom with Raspberry Pi from Maker Faire on FORA.tv