As you may have noticed, we’re having a bit of trouble with the comments facility on the website at the moment. (The problem is being caused by our new load balancer.) We’re working on it – we hope to have comments available again by tomorrow!
Move along, nothing to see! We’ve fixed the problem, which was caused by some WordPress plugins not playing nice with the load balancer. Get commenting!
We’ve just had an email from one of our distributors:
I have noticed an increase in the quantity of returns where it’s claimed by the customer that the Pi will not boot. My view is that in the majority of instances they are attempting to use the unit with an OS that is not compatible with the Hynix chip, often inserting a card from a Pi they already have which reinforces the view in their mind that the new unit is faulty.
Just yesterday I received a batch of 21 units from a school and upon testing with the latest version of Raspbian Wheezy all booted normally.
If your 512MB Pi has a Hynix memory chip in the middle of the board (that’s the black, square RAM chip right in the centre, and it’ll either say Samsung or Hynix on it in white letters), please ensure you are using the latest version of Raspbian, which you can get from the downloads link at the top of the page. The version on that page will always be the latest available. It seems a lot of the people who have been caught out by this are folk who have bought a pre-flashed card from someone on eBay or Amazon. We always recommend against this, because the images on those grey-market cards are often months out of date – and a lot of work is done on the software every week, so a months-old operating system will bear little resemblance to the newest version. If you absolutely must buy a pre-loaded SD card, make sure you buy it from a reputable source.
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!
MagPi
The November edition of the MagPi is out! The MagPi is a community magazine produced by Raspberry Pi owners, and is now available in print as well as as a free download. If you’d like to see the MagPi have a future in print, please buy a copy. They’re not expensive at £2.49, and if the team are to raise enough cash to be able to offer the back issues in print as well (which I know many schools have expressed an interest in), they need your support.
This month’s issue has an interview with Mike Thompson, the man behind Raspbian, a tutorial on getting your Pi talking to an Arduino, a really nice piece from Jaseman on the evolution of the Pi since February, an introduction to C++, a competition, and plenty of hardware and software projects for you to get your teeth into. Download a PDF at the MagPi’s site, or buy a printed copy at Mod My Pi (not available at the time of posting, but it should be soon – I’ll amend this post when it is).
Picade
After less than two days on Kickstarter, the Picade project, which was set up to build a gorgeous arcade cabinet around the Raspberry Pi, has reached its initial funding goal! There’s still time to jump on the funding wagon so the boys at Pimoroni can reach their stretch goals if you’d like to be part of the UK’s first ever Kickstarter (and happen to like retro games, slammin’ style and Raspberry Pi); head on over if you’d like to take part.
Ken (Jon) and Ryu (Paul) realise that they are perfectly matched. This could be the start of a long session.
Bletchley
If you’re in a pledging mood, we’d also encourage you to take a look at this book by Dr Sue Black, a Friend of Pi and an exceptional educator and advocate for women in tech. It’s on a subject very dear to us – saving Bletchley Park – and we’re really pleased to see it’s reached its funding goals too (like Picade, it got to its goal blisteringly fast). You can still donate, and importantly, a proportion of profits go to Bletchley Park. Sadly, the donation tier that involved Sue knitting a pair of socks for the donor has now sold out. But there’s still some good stuff left.
Stuff
We won another award! Raspberry Pi won Innovation of the Year at the Stuff Gadget Awards last night, and Alex B went along to the ceremony to pick it up. At the moment, our search for offices involves careful consideration of just how much shelving we need for these things.
Adafruit
Adafruit, who carry a lot of Raspberry Pi-related gear as well as selling Raspberry Pis themselves, have been unfortunate enough to find themselves right in the middle of Hurricane Sandy. I had mail from PT and Lady Ada earlier this week and an update this morning: they’re in the part of NYC which was hit the hardest and are still without power. UPS haven’t been sending anything in or out of Manhattan since the storm, but Adafruit hope to be able to start stocking and shipping again this weekend or early next week. It’s a pretty rough time for them; this happened right in the middle of a move to new premises, and we’ve been thinking about them a lot this week. We hope you can support them by ordering some cool Pi stuff from Adafruit the next time you feel like tinkering with something new.
Limor “Lady Ada” Fried in a Manhattan that looks as if it ought to be populated by zombies.
Guest posts
We’ve had a lot of interest from our call for guest posts. We’d like to see even more! If you’d like to write a post for this blog about your adventures with Raspberry Pi, your ideas about computing education, your project ideas, or your thoughts on low-cost computing, please email blog@raspberrypi.org. I’m away for a couple of weeks from Monday, and this blog will be being curated by the lovely Clive, who will be selecting the very best articles and posting them here.
Eben and I are going to be away for a couple of weeks next month, helping my Mum celebrate a birthday with a 0 on the end, in foreign parts. We’d like to see some guest posts from you while we’re not around to curate this blog – pictures of your projects, a few words about what your kids are doing with the Pi, thoughts on teaching, essays on the sort of opportunities access to cheap hardware can bring, ideas about the future, what you think should be going on in schools and universities – we’re open to anything and everything, as long as it has some relevance to the Raspberry Pi project.
If you’d like to take part, please email blog@raspberrypi.org with your completed post, and any pictures, video or other media you want to use. Our hardworking moderators will be looking after things while we’re away, and they’ll be helping me to select which posts we publish.
Whenever a Raspberry Pi is sent back to the distributor as a faulty unit, someone in the chain (we at the Foundation, the distributors, and now the factory in Wales) tests the unit to see what was wrong with it, so we can try to eliminate any problems in later production runs. We get very few returns, and I’m very happy to be able to say that nearly half of the returns we do get involve Raspberry Pis which don’t actually have any problems at all; in these cases what’s usually going on is that the user hasn’t flashed the SD card correctly (or, sometimes, at all!), or hasn’t connected it to a display device properly.
But occasionally it’s been challenging to find out what’s up with a broken unit. In these cases, we sometimes ask the customer to send us the power supply they’ve been using (and, from time to time, some other peripherals too) so we can dig a little deeper.
Everybody testing returned units used in the UK has noted a problem out there with some power supplies, all of which appear to be counterfeit Apple chargers. We’ve all compared notes, and we’re all seeing the same thing: some of you are using chargers you’ve bought in good faith which are not the real thing, and which don’t behave like a safety-tested, properly engineered piece of hardware.
We’ve found that there are three specific, different kinds of fake Apple charger popping up and causing trouble in the UK. We know that Trading Standards are already aware of these fake PSUs; apparently raids on suppliers have been carried out, but there are still plenty of them out there. Here’s some video which should help you check that yours is the real thing. If you find that your charger is a fake, take it back to the seller and raise a stink: and most importantly, stop using it immediately. You could damage your Pi or yourself (and anything else you plug into the PSU).
Updated to add: some very helpful links are appearing in the comments with technical details about these and similar PSUs, teardown pictures and video and so on. It’s worth swinging by to read them if you’re interested in learning more.
Sorry posts are a bit sporadic this week (we’re rather neglecting Twitter too): the last couple of days have consisted mainly of driving across large bits of America, spending large amounts of quality hackspace, speaking and teaching time – and sleeping, eating, washing and all that unavoidable stuff. I got a grand total of half an hour in front of a computer yesterday, which I ended up spending on the enormous pile of email that’s building up while we’re out of the office.
Alongside the hackspace visits, we’ve also been doing teaching workshops with a group of very clever kids from the Broadcom Masters programme. You can read more about it here.
Yesterday’s visit to Hackerspace Charlotte was just brilliant – we couldn’t believe the turnout and the enthusiasm, and it was great to see some of the projects people brought along to the show and tell. We’ll have some video later of Eben’s talk (a longer version of the missing Maker Faire talk).
We’re now heading off to Columbia NC, then Charleston, for today’s two talks. More of that later!
We were hoping to feature Eben’s talk (which is a bit of a departure from the talks he’s been giving up until now) here this week, but unfortunately the guys at Make lost the video when attempting to upload it, because they had a horrible network SNAFU.
Were you at Maker Faire on Saturday? Did you record Eben’s talk? Please let us know if you did – we’d love to have a copy, because we want to share it!
Liz and I are taking a couple of days away from the internet while we attend a family funeral. Normal service will recommence on Wednesday.