news | Raspberry Pi

Testing’s done!

Good news! We just received confirmation that the Raspberry Pi has passed EMC testing without requiring any hardware modifications.

As you may know, we’ve had periods booked in a testing chamber at Panasonic’s facility in South Wales for the whole week. Jimmy, Craig and Gareth from Gainspeed, our EMC consultants (with assistance from Phil the EMC lab manager, occasional assistance/hampering from Eben and the aid of many Asda sausage sandwiches), have been working into the evenings, and lost their Good Friday holiday to get all the testing finished. There is still a mountain of paperwork for us to sign, and that then has to be looked over by RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell; but that’s a piece of cake compared to what we’ve been doing all week. Given that we’ve had the chamber for the whole week, we’ve used the time to make sure that alongside the CE requirements, the Raspberry Pi also complies with FCC regulations (USA) as well as CTick (Australia) and what we’ve been calling “that Canadian thing”.

The Raspberry Pi had to pass radiated and conducted emissions and immunity tests in a variety of configurations (a single run can take hours), and was subjected to electrostatic discharge (ESD) testing to establish its robustness to being rubbed on a cat. It’s a long process, involving a scary padded room full of blue cones, turntables that rise and fall on demand, and a thing that looks a lot like a television aerial crossed with Cthulhu.

A cute story. Radiated immunity testing involves hitting the Raspberry Pi hard with narrow-band EM radiation, while checking (amongst many other things) that the device is still able to send Ethernet frames to a hub. The first time the team did this, the light on the hub stopped blinking: no frames were making it through. They did it again: still nothing. Finally, they discovered that the hub (which, I should point out, gave every appearance of being CE marked, so it should have been able to get through these tests itself) was being knocked out every time somebody pressed the button. Jimmy used a longer cable, put the hub outside the field, and found that the Raspberry Pi got through its immunity tests with no problems at all.

Finally, there’s small change to the legal gubbins. I know some of you felt like I did about the paragraph in our trademark rules which said that in products and websites, the words “Raspberry Pi” should only be used as an adjective to avoid genericisation – namely that it was a bloody stupid idea. This thing’s called a Raspberry Pi, not a Raspberry Pi computer. We at the Foundation call the computer a Raspberry Pi in conversation. So does everybody we’ve spoken to about it. We don’t abbreviate it to Raspicomp, but to Raspi or RP; none of the mountains of press coverage we’ve had have used Raspberry Pi adjectivally. So we had a chat about it; reminded ourselves that advice we get from our legal team is just that: advice, not binding instruction; and we’ve removed the paragraph from the trademark rules.

Some little bits and bobs of news – and more photos

A post for little bits of news that didn’t really fit in anywhere else.

First of all, we’ve added a new page to the bar at the top. It’s a list of trademark rules; we’ve been getting a lot of questions from you about using the words “Raspberry Pi” or the logo on websites, books or products, so we thought we should put the rules in a central place. As always, you can mail me if you’ve got any questions.

Pete Lomas, who did the hardware design for the final version of the Raspberry Pi, did a blog post for element14 yesterday about his experience of the compliance stuff we’re working through this week. It’s well worth a read, and he’s said he’ll drop by to answer any questions you might have here later, so leave a comment if you’d like to ask anything.

And finally, some of you were asking whether there were any photos of the Raspberry Pis we have already in the UK. (We showed you some pictures from the factory the other day.) Jack, trustee extraordinaire and our COO, sent me these. Sadly, he has not done the hostage proof-of-life thing by making the pallet hold today’s newspaper, nor has he balanced a cucumber sandwich and a cup of tea on the Raspberry Pis to demonstrate that they are in England; but they’re here, waiting to go out to you as soon as EM tests are passed and the CE docs are filed.

Palletised Pis

I'm wondering if this counts as the first unboxing post!

Each of these little boxes holds 50 Raspberry Pis.

We're really pleased they pack down so neatly - one of the reasons we aimed for a footprint as small as possible was to ensure shipping costs for schools and other institutions around the world would be nice and low. You could outfit two classrooms with what's in this box alone.

Jack's removed one from the box (remember, it's the size of a pack of cards) and put it on top so you can get an idea of scale.

An update on CE compliance

Update 23.45pm Mar 30: minor changes to the article to reflect the fact that recent versions of the BeagleBoard-xM appear to have acquired a CE mark.

Update, 8.40pm Mar 28: element14 have put out a new update to their FAQ, enlarging on what’s happening with CE compliance. It’s well worth a read – head on over!

Update, 6pm Mar 28: we have spoken with BIS this morning, and they have confirmed that, given the volumes involved and the demographic mix of likely users, any development board exemption is not applicable to us; as a result, even the first uncased developer units of Raspberry Pi will require a CE mark prior to sale in the EU. As we mention below, we are working with RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell to bring Raspberry Pi into a compliant state as soon as is humanly possible.

Following on from last week’s discussions, both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell have now informed us that they are not able to distribute the Raspberry Pi until it has received the CE mark. While this differs from our historical view (as we’ve said before, we believed that the uncased Raspberry Pi was not a “finished end product”, and could be distributed on the same terms as earlier versions of the BeagleBoard and other non-CE-marked platforms), we respect their right to make that decision.

The good news is that our first 2,000 boards arrived in the UK on Monday and that we are working to get them CE marked as soon as is humanly possible, in parallel with bringing the remainder of our initial batch into the country. Pete and Eben have been burning the midnight oil – literally; I only exchanged about three words with Eben yesterday, and those were when he got back in from a long day’s hacking at two in the morning. On the basis of preliminary measurements, we expect emissions from the uncased product to meet category A requirements comfortably without modification, and possibly to meet the more stringent category B requirements which we had originally expected would require a metalised case.

We’re also talking to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), to better understand the terms under which other non-CE-marked platforms are permitted to ship to domestic end users in the UK, and to obtain a definitive statement as to whether we can distribute on the same terms. We should say the UK Government in general, and BIS in particular, have been incredibly supportive of the project so far; they are looking into this as a matter of urgency, so hopefully we should have another update for you soon. With graphs in. We know you guys love graphs.

All this means that we’re waiting on one of two things – the results of further EMC tests, and whatever BIS comes back to us with – before RS and element 14/Premier Farnell can give you any firm delivery dates. We’ll let you know as soon as we do.

Finally, here, as promised, are some pictures from the factory (taken by one of the observers RS sent in – both RS and element14 have people onsite to oversee production) of the boards that the Foundation now has.

Raspberry pis in the factory

Each board spends a short while at the test bench. These are functionality tests which are performed in China, not the compliance tests we're doing later this week in the UK.

Once a board has passed, it's ready to be put in an anti-static bag and sent out.

Where have you been, Liz?

Huge apologies for going quiet on you. Eben and I have been on a skiing holiday, but I managed to fall and twist my knee quite badly in the middle of last week. Eben is a sweetheart and curtailed the holiday to take me down the hill to spend a few days in a rented cabin where I could do a bit more than stare forlornly at snow, drinking tequila, while everybody else had fun on skis.

That cabin didn’t have any internet. (Which was great, actually, but clearly has raised some worries among some of you.) I didn’t know about it beforehand so wasn’t able to warn you – have to say, I heartily recommend going offline for a few days. We cooked steaks over a camp fire, did lots of stuff you’d probably find endlessly tedious like birdwatching from the cabin window, and I got to complain about my knee a lot.

Anyway, I’m back in the land of the connected now, and I’ve got a Q&A with Pete to post a little later on when I can hunt down a power cable for my laptop. Houpla! More to come later this afternoon (California time).

It’s my birthday, so please be nice in the comments.

Raspberry Pi (momentarily) more popular than Lady Gaga…

We’ve just been pointed at a graph from Google Trends by @thormagnusson on Twitter. It seems that for a little while last week, there were more searches worldwide for “Raspberry Pi” than there were for “Lady Gaga”.

Key: Lady Gaga is blue, Raspberry Pi is red. Click through for more detail.

I am having to sit down for a minute to process that.

Manufacturing hiccup

It’s inevitable, isn’t it – you’re freewheeling along perfectly happily and then you get a puncture.

As you’ll have noticed, there’s been a bit of a delay in shipping the first batch of Raspberry Pis out to people. This is because of a hardware parts substitution that was made in the factory by accident: specifically, where we’d specified jacks with integrated magnetics in the BOM and schematics, the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks. No magnetics means no network connection. We’ve known about this for four days now, but we haven’t been able to tell you about it because it meant we had to do some further tests to make sure that nothing else was affected.

An illustration of where the factory went wrong - one of these jacks has integrated magnetics and the other doesn't. Which do you think is which? (I'll leave the answer in the comments later when you've had a chance to guess. Don't be misled into thinking there's information in the colour of the connectors.) It's actually very hard to tell unless you look at the insides of the part, either by doing what Gordon did and using pliers to take it apart when he realised something was wrong ("tin opener method") or...

…by taking an X-ray. The jacks in this image are not necessarily in the same order as the ones in the spot-the-difference image above - I'm not making it that easy for you!

This is a side view of the sort of jack we didn't want on the board. Pete Lomas, who designed the Raspberry Pi hardware, unmounted this jack from one of the boards we got back from the factory and X-rayed it for us.

This jack has integrated magnetics. You can see from the X-ray that it looks very different internally from the non-magnetic version above.

Happily, it’s a very minor problem to fix (desolder the dud jack/solder on a new one), and the factory is nearly done working on replacing them on the first set of boards. This means that the first tranche of boards should still go out to customers as we were expecting. There may now be a slight delay in later batches if there’s a problem sourcing enough magnetic jacks (we’ve got teams hunting them down already); all the stock of jacks we believed we had in place and ready to turn into the ethernet ports on your Raspberry Pis turn out not to be the correct part, so we’re having to start again and move through the negotiating/ordering/delivery cycle as fast as we can. Our partners at Element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Components are working hard to help us cater for this, and to expedite supply of the Raspberry Pi.

We are very, very sorry. We know you want your Raspberry Pi as soon as possible (and many of you are being inhumanly patient, having followed us since we launched this website eight months ago). We’ll keep you updated with how manufacture is moving; this is, in the scheme of things, a minor problem, but it’s still a bump in the road and we know that we rely on your goodwill to keep things moving forward.

Adieu to the database errors!

Because Pete Stevens at Mythic Beasts is brilliant, the period the site was down for while he moved our database and web servers lasted for under 5 minutes (and in the time between his bringing everything back up, dialling my phone number and my picking up, we had 30k hits, which graphically illustrates our need for the move…)

We think everything is working smoothly now, and all the functionality with commenting and posting on the forums should be there. If you see anything peculiar, please leave a comment here or email us using the contact page (link at top of page).

Liz again, 15:34h. Because so many of you were asking for details here and on Twitter about what our server setup is, Pete’s just mailed me this:

Thanks for the nice comments. Since they’re all going to ask, feel free to post on my behalf,

The new box is dedicated to raspberrypi.org. There’s a fairly quick six disk RAID10 array with battery backed cache and enough RAM to cache everything on disk without really running short. Some server porn from /proc

# cat /proc/meminfo | head -1
MemTotal: 99202196 kB

# pvscan
PV /dev/sda5 VG mainvg lvm2 [4.05 TiB / 3.95 TiB free]

# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc
8 24 112

# w
15:12:37 up 17:08, 10 users, load average: 1.39, 1.09, 0.86

Whilst the box doesn’t have that much CPU, everything should be served direct from memory so we should be able to keep those CPUs nice and busy. I have a plan to add lots of quad core web processing boxes on the front if it turns out to be necessary.

Now being the generous lot you are you’re probably about to hang me for incorrectly configuring the kitten morphing plugin for wordpress that I didn’t know about, and the few minutes where we probably threw comments away while I did the db dump/restore. Flame on…

Pete

It’s almost as if he’s read the comments section here before…but as far as we are aware, all kittens are being morphed correctly.

Server maintenance

In the last month or so, we’ve steadily accumulated so many daily visitors that our server setup just isn’t up to the task of dealing with all of them any more. This is why you’re seeing database errors so frequently.

Tomorrow (March 7 2012) we’ll be taking the website offline while we migrate to new servers with our friends at Mythic Beasts. The exact time that’ll happen depends on what Pete’s schedule looks like, but we hope the downtime won’t last for more than a couple of hours. Make the most of those database error messages now, because once we come back up again, you shouldn’t ever have to look at one again (at least on this website).