Model A | Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi camera module sneak peek, and Model A unboxing

Of course, Model A is not the only new bit of hardware we’re releasing in 2013. JamesH just sent me these pictures of the forthcoming camera board to whet your appetite. This is the final hardware; we’ve been working on tuning (Gert tells me that picture quality is “pretty good” at the moment, but we’re hoping to get it to “bleedin’ marvellous” before we release the hardware), and there is some work to do on the drivers, but everything’s looking pretty peachy for the moment. I don’t have a release date for you yet, but we’re probably at least a month away (and possibly more) from being able to sell these at the moment.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Meanwhile, Model A boards are already starting to appear in the wild. Alex from Raspi.TV, a fan site, has what I think is the first blog post about the Model A from someone who’s bought one. (The blue splodge he mentions, which can be removed with meths, is an artefact of the testing process. At certain times of day, when the production line is relatively quiet, that splodge is added as a visual demonstration that the Pi has been through the whole battery of factory tests.)

He also has some video of the board. Plug it in, Alex!

Model A now for sale in Europe – buy one today!

RS Components and Premier Farnell/element14 have Model A Raspberry Pis in stock as of this morning. (See the Where To Buy area on the right side of the page for links.) For the first tranche of orders, Model A will only be available in Europe. We’ll lift this restriction very soon so the rest of the world can order too.

The Model A is a stripped-down version of the Model B Raspberry Pi, with no Ethernet, one USB port and 256MB RAM. If you’d like to learn more, check out this post from a couple of months back.

Stripping down the Model A means it has two important differences from the Model B: we can make it ten dollars cheaper, at $25; and it consumes roughly a third of the power of the Model B, which is of key importance to those of you wanting to run projects from a battery or solar power: robots, sensor platforms in remote locations, Wi-Fi repeaters attached to the local bus stop and so forth. We’re working on software to get the power consumption even lower. And we’ve seen how well XBMC works on the early 256MB Model Bs we sold last year; it’ll work just as well if you want to make a $25 media centre out of your Model A.

RS customers outside Europe (Allied in the US) can order a Model A now, but there will be a short delay in processing their order because we’re waiting on some paperwork before the Pis can be shipped. Farnell customers outside Europe (Newark in the US) will see Model A appear on their local sites when this paperwork has been filled.

We are very, very pleased to finally be able to offer you a computer for $25. It’s what we said we’d do all along, and we can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Twelve Pis of Christmas: Eben

Today’s the last day we’ll be listing a very limited pre-production Model A bundle for auction. We’re selecting charities to benefit from the money raised; today’s charity was actually both my and Eben’s first choice, but we couldn’t choose the same one for two auctions, so saved today’s for last. Today’s auction proceeds are going to The Samaritans.

In 2007, one of our very dearest friends, Chris Lightfoot (whom we all called Oggie, so he’ll be Oggie for the rest of this post) killed himself. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 35 in the UK, and what happened to Oggie still bewilders us; he had battled depression for all of his life, but we’ll never know why he did it. He and I had been at school, then later at Cambridge together, where we both met Eben around the same time. He was the cleverest of all of us; Oggie wasn’t famous, but he still merited a half-page obituary in the Times for the astonishing work he’d achieved in his 28 years. He was a founder of MySociety, the e-democracy charity, and…well, Oggie’s Wikipedia page can precis what he did there better than I can. His friends also kept his personal website online – it’s worth spending a little while there to get to know him better. Oggie’s worth knowing.

Oggie, punting in Grantchester Meadows. Ironing was not one of his many talents. Click to visit auction.

Oggie was a modern polymath. He had an innate talent as a social statistician; he was adept at politics. He was a superb coder; an exceptional writer; a mathematician and a funny, funny man. I saw him just before he died, and we were falling about laughing over some of the submissions to the new e-Petitions website (that’s the site that the UK government now uses) which he had built and had to moderate; we clinked glasses over someone’s petition to make Tony Blair take a bath in baked beans. And then he was gone.

There isn’t a single day that goes past when Eben and I don’t think and talk about him. Oggie: I use the silly giant pepper grinder you bought us for our wedding daily. I use your tools to check up on what my MP’s up to, to read Hansard and to host this website. I keep the books you left behind when you died in the bedroom. I wish you were here to enjoy Raspberry Pi with us. You’d have loved it. I miss you.

The Samaritans are there to offer emotional support to people who, like Oggie, are in deep distress. Their job is a hard and taxing one, and they rely entirely on volunteers. They save lives; please bid on this auction.

Twelve Pis of Christmas: Jack Lang

We’re auctioning off the very first 12 pre-production Model A Raspberry Pis, with some other goodies like signed books, shirts and an Adafruit Pi Plate, to raise money for charities over the holidays. Only 12 of these pre-production boards will ever be made. The first two boards we’re auctioning end in under 24 hours; go and have a look if you want to own a piece of computing history.

Jack Lang, a Founding Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the Foundation’s Chair, is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. His career hasn’t just been fascinating; it’s positively surreal. He’s been an award-winning restaurateur, a developer for the BBC Micro in its very early days, and founder of a number of successful tech startups. He’s Entrepreneur in Residence at the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, lectures at the Judge Institute at Cambridge, and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He smokes his own bacon, has a brick pizza oven in his garden, writes for food journals, and makes Consommé à la Royale so wonderful it’ll bring tears to the eyes. He also has a licence for Class IV fireworks displays, and used to be a roadie for Pink Floyd. Jack is brilliant.

Jack Lang, doing something interesting. As usual. Click to bid on Jack’s Pi.

Jack’s chosen charity is one he has a long association with. The Humanitarian Centre is an international development network that connects people working in academia, industry, government and charities to develop more effective ways of working together to tackle global poverty and inequality. The Humanitarian Centre is based in Cambridge, and is affiliated with the University.

Bid on Jack’s Pi here, or click on the picture.

Twelve Pis of Christmas: the mods

We’re auctioning off the very first 12 pre-production Model A Raspberry Pis, with some other goodies like books, shirts and an Adafruit Pi Plate, to raise money for charities over Christmas.

Today’s charity was chosen (they held a vote and everything) by the team of mods who work so hard to keep our forums a nice place to be: they make sure this site is innocent of spam and flamewars, and make sure it’s a friendly and informative place for kids and new-to-all-this adults to visit. We think they do an incredible job, and they work extraordinarily hard (I’ve just checked the logs, and in the last hour or so just one member of the team has done 50 separate pieces of work, moderating and OK-ing new posts, squashing spam accounts and doing all the other behind-the-scenes stuff you don’t see).

It doesn’t stop: we get thousands of new posts on the forums every day; every single one of them needs checking to make sure it’s not a sneaky advert for a flimsy plastic kichen (we get a lot of kitchen spam, for some reason), and we couldn’t run this place without the incredibly hard work the mods do. So THANK YOU, Abishur, ukscone, ShiftPlusOne, Jamesh, Gert, Obarthelemy, Jongoleur, Dom, Guru, asb, stevepdp, Jessie, Plugwash, Lynbarn, MPThompson, Scep, Mahjongg, Sparky, rdb and Masafumi_Ohta. We appreciate the work you do to keep our forums a safe, happy and informative place all the time, but we particularly appreciate it at Christmas, when we know you have presents to play with and those big boxes of cheesy nibbles to eat.

Click to bid on the Mods’ Pi (and other affiliated goodies). There will only ever be 12 of these pre-production models made, and this one is currently a total steal.

The mods’ chosen organisation is the Open Rights Group (who are not registered with eBay’s charity arm, so the funds look as if they’re going to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but we will be paying 100% of the money raised on this auction to the Open Rights Group). The ORG is UK’s leading voice defending freedom of expression, privacy, innovation, creativity and consumer rights on the net. ORG is a member organisation of European Digital Rights (EDRi). They campaign to change public policy whenever digital rights are threatened, by talking to policy-makers, informing the public through the media, and mobilising their supporters.

Click here to bid!

Twelve Pis of Christmas: Pete Lomas

Merry Christmas everybody! I hope you all found what you were hoping for in your stockings.

Today’s charity auction of a Model A Raspberry Pi and accessories has been set up to benefit Claire House Children’s Hospice, which aims to enhance the quality of life for children and young people with a life-limiting or life-threatening condition. Pete Lomas a Founding Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and MD of hardware design and manufacture company Norcott Technologies, selected Claire House as his charity. All money raised in this auction will be donated directly to Claire House. Click here, or on Pete’s Christmas visage, to bid!

Twelve Pis of Christmas: Alan Mycroft

Today’s auction of a Raspberry Pi Model A (with accompanying goodies including an Adafruit Pi Plate, a signed copy of the Raspberry Pi User Guide by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree, and a swanky Pi T-shirt) is to raise funds for Alan Mycroft’s chosen charity, Mary’s Meals. Alan is Professor of Computing at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and a founding trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Professor Alan Mycroft. Click to bid on Alan’s Raspberry Pi.

Mary’s Meals provides daily meals to chronically hungry children in places of learning around the world. By providing one good meal for hungry, impoverished children every school day, they give the children both the energy and the opportunity to learn, which can be their escape route out of poverty in later life.

Alan says: “I chose Mary’s Meals for my charity because of the parallels to Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi enables computer education for children and adults previously inhibited by lack of access to open and programmable computer systems. Mary’s Meals enables education for children previously inhibited by lack of access to food”

You can bid on Alan’s Raspberry Pi here.

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.

Twelve Pis of Christmas: We’re auctioning off the first model As!

Last year, we auctioned the very first Raspberry Pi Model Bs to come off the line to raise money for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We’re doing the same this year, but instead of raising money for Raspberry Pi, we have selected (and asked some of our closest partner organisations to select) twelve other charities to benefit from the funds raised. Each of the trustees has also chosen a charity – you’ll get to find out what those were as the auctions progress.

The Pis we are selling on eBay are the first production sample Raspberry Pi Model As to come off the line. They’ll have a tantalisingly low serial number, and you will be one of the first people in the world to own one. We’ll also be bundling some other goodies too, including a Pi Plate from Adafruit, a signed copy of the Raspberry Pi User Guide by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree, a lovely Raspberry Pi t-shirt, and a signed certificate from the Foundation stating that you are the owner of one of the very first Model As ever to be made.

The first two auctions went live this morning. RS Components have chosen CLIC Sargent, the children’s cancer charity, to benefit from the funds raised from their Pi, and the manufacturing team at Sony in Pencoed (the people who build your Pis) have chosen NSPCC Cymru, the Welsh arm of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Each auction will start at £20 ($32.49).

We’ll be releasing another Pi every day until all twelve are gone: get bidding!

A quick Model A show and tell from Adafruit

We sent our friends LadyAda and PT at Adafruit one of the first production sample Model A boards – as well as stocking them at Adafruit when we go to full production, we had a feeling that they might like to try to get in there early with some add-on development work. It’s just arrived in New York, and they’ve taken some video and pictures. We thought you’d like to share.

PT also took some pictures which are a bit better than the wobbly cell phone one we showed you a couple of weeks back:

Model A product sample. Click to embiggen.

Model A, back view. Click to enlarge.

In other news, Eben picked up his IT Pro IT Leader of the Year award yesterday. We refused to follow him back to the station because we thought it was funny.

Updated to add: Pete Wood from DesignSpark, who we also sent a board to, sent me some video of his own about 45 minutes after I’d first published this post. His video is below; he’s also written a post about the Model A with some comparison photos over at DesignSpark.