RS | Raspberry Pi

Tuesday video grab bag

First up, here’s our friend Pete from RS talking about the Raspberry Pi’s potential in education. When he talks about Christmas, Pete is joking, so please don’t spam the comments in horror.

Meanwhile, in America, the guys at Adafruit have been busy making add-on boards (they’re calling them “plates”) for the Raspberry Pi. We think this is really exciting stuff. (Eben shouts from across the room: “It’s awesome!”, and I agree.)

Dave Honess has compiled Open Transport Tycoon for his Raspberry Pi, following the instructions at http://wiki.openttd.org/Compiling_on_Linux - he shares the results here. I now expect global productivity to take a slight dip while everybody with a Raspberry Pi drops what they’re doing to play Open TTD.

Dave says in an email:

Yeah, the binaries can be downloaded from here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14125489/openttdpi.zip

I think Hexxeh’s version will be better when he’s finished it though – as he’s porting it to work outside of the X desktop and also to the the gpu acceleration. Mine is just a straight svn checkout and build with no code changes. So we should tell everyone to use his one when it’s done!

Thanks Dave! [Update, 1400h PST - Dave would also like me to draw your attention to a blog post he's written on the subject, which contains some more instructions.]

BBC Look East news piece from yesterday

This video was on yesterday’s Look East, and has just appeared on the BBC’s website. It’s only two minutes long – enjoy!

Some fun video from RS

Raspberry Pis have been arriving on doorsteps this morning, and RS Components just sent me this video of last week’s delivery to their distribution centre in Corby. Eben doesn’t usually move this fast without the promise of chocolate cake – it made me grin like an idiot.

Some TV coverage from today

As RS Electronics and element14/Premier Farnell are preparing over the weekend to send out the first boards, we’ve had some more TV coverage which you might enjoy. For some reason, ITN is using Vimeo (why does anyone use Vimeo?), so I’ll link to the article and video on their site rather than embedding it here – you’ll see packing going on towards the end of the video. One of those boxes might have your Raspi in it.

We also had a spot on Newsround today (Newsround is the BBC’s news program for kids). As usual with these broadcast videos, the web version doesn’t have captions, but the fella with the beard is Professor Alan Mycroft, one of our Trustees; and the younger guy in the lab is Alex Bradbury, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and one of our most stalwart volunteer developers. I really enjoyed watching this – it’s another piece where a kid is given a Raspberry Pi to play with (in this case, Ivo is using Scratch for the first time), and his reaction is just great.

Here’s a bonus picture of Eben partway through loading our car up with half of that pallet of Raspis you saw in the pictures from last week, to take to the distributors. (The nice thing about the Raspberry Pi is that it’s so tiny, you can easily fit a thousand in an estate car at a time if you put the back seats down.) We won’t have to do this again, thankfully; from now on, element14 and RS are making them and shipping them to the distribution sites themselves.

Scep, one of our forum members, found a bain marie in a skip last week. For those wondering, the skip here is full of garden waste, not Raspberry Pis..

There should be more of this sort of thing to come in the next week, as Raspberry Pis start shipping. Watch this space!

RS availability and purchasing info update

This has just landed in my mailbox from the guys at RS Components, and needs sharing:

Hi Liz! I wanted to give you a quick update on some progress we have made with simplifying the international ordering process for Raspberry Pi’s from RS. This is in addition to the universal worldwide pricing info shared recently, and we believe that it will provide help for RS customers all over the world.

We will be opening up a bespoke Online Raspberry Pi Store for customers to order their Raspberry Pi Model B boards and all associated accessories. The store will be opened up to customers who have registered with RS, in sequence, according to the time that they registered their interest with us. Our new Raspberry Pi Store has been designed to support private individuals wishing to purchase Raspberry Pi’s and has a number of advantages for customers:

The current RS websites do not support PayPal but the new RS Raspberry Pi Store will accept orders via PayPal, Visa and Mastercard. (I know there has been some questions about this!)

Customers will be able to select between payment currencies of GBP£, Euro€ or USD$.

We are no longer restricted from selling to private individuals in Austria, so we are able to support all countries unless we are legally prohibited by trade restrictions.

If you have any questions please leave them below, and I’ll try to get someone from RS to come along later and answer them. I know some of you are waiting on an update on CE marking; I hope we’ll have something for you before the end of today, so keep your eyes on the blog.

Update, 14:27: RS just emailed me to say:

[Conversation about Liz's knee redacted.]

…Please reassure everyone that RS have not removed ANYONE from our queue of registrants and that we will be inviting people into the Raspberry Pi Store just as soon as we can get a fix on the compliance implications! We are unable to respond to individual enquires from registrants for now, but we are issuing weekly updates via email to everyone who has registered with RS. If people are not yet receiving our weekly emails then it’s possible that the wrong email address may have been entered at the time of registration. In this case, we would strongly recommend that people re-register with RS Components as soon as possible.

Pricing updates (good news!) from Element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Components

As you may know if you’ve been reading our Twitter feed or hanging out in the forums here, we asked our worldwide distribution partners, Element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Components, to offer you a bit of clarification about pricing around the world for the Raspberry Pi and its shipping, because some of you were getting some confusing feedback. Using the information below, you should be able to make a decision about which supplier is the best choice for where you live.

I’ll start with RS’s response, because it’s a bit shorter:

In response to your request for a breakdown of the RS prices and shipping across the world for Raspberry Pi Model B….

With demand running at such a high level, and in an effort to keep things as simple as possible, RS have decided to set a single global price and a single global delivery charge! This should help you communicate to the Raspberry Pi community very clearly.

We will allow all orders to be placed on our website using this universal pricing mechanism, which will ensure that we ship on a first-come first-served basis to everyone that has registered, in the order that they registered with RS following the launch on 29^th Feb. It will also enable us to ship one Raspberry Pi to each customer who places their order, until availability eases and we can ship multiple Pi’s to anyone requesting more. We will be in contact with our registered customers with instructions on how to place their orders over the next few days, as we will soon be able to provide accurate availability information based upon volume manufacturing.

So, in every country that we are legally able to ship to, where we are not restricted from selling to private individuals*, we will apply the following universal £GBP selling price, shipping charges and VAT:

Raspberry Pi Model B = £21.60

+ Shipping Charge = £4.95 (this shipping charge also covers any accessories ordered to be shipped with a Raspberry Pi – Customers will only pay ONE charge of £4.95 per shipment)

VAT @20% = £5.31

(Liz edit: if you’re in the EU but outside the UK, your VAT may be calculated differently. Outside the EU you will not pay VAT, but will still have to pay any local sales and import taxes.)

Total inc VAT and shipping = £31.86

PAYMENT: We will accept payment via PayPal and Credit Cards. Any customer ordering with a credit card will be charged in local currency by the bank issuing the credit card, in accordance with the bank’s exchange rate policy.

The single Shipping Charge of £4.95 will apply to all orders and will also include any Raspberry Pi accessories ordered from RS at the same time as the Raspberry Pi Model B board (eg. Memory Card, Power Supply, Cables, Keyboard, Mouse etc.). We will not charge a further shipping charge for any accessories that are ordered and shipped with the Raspberry Pi board.

* - Currently we are restricted in selling to private individuals in Austria only.
[ADDENDUM : This means the only place individuals cannot buy from RS is Austria.]

Just to let you know that we now have in excess of 200,000 registrations of interest. This was still growing at 10 per minute yesterday!

Element 14/Premier Farnell, knowing the Raspberry Pi consumer’s love of a good graph or table, have come up with some tabulated data:

March 27 update: the pricing information below is superseded by the information from this new matrix. I’m leaving the text below, but struck out, so you’re still able to make comparisons. Please note the text at the very bottom, which is still relevant.

~~element14 Pricing Update~~

~~As we work with Raspberry Pi to distribute the Model B $35 boards globally, there has been some confusion and discussion around our worldwide pricing.~~

In an effort to simplify our pricing and communicate transparently with our customers we have produced the following grid for consumers which shows for each country the price per device, including delivery costs in relevant currency, avoiding the need to calculate back from GPB to local currency in most instances.

The variable element is local sales tax which still needs to be added to the delivered price. This is proving hard to simplify!

For countries where it is straightforward to do so we have added local sales tax to the grid below , for example the UK where VAT at 20% has been added giving a total price including delivery and tax of £29.46. However for countries such as the USA where there are different sales taxes for every state we have added a link to help customers calculate the final price in local currency, in an attempt not to over-complicate the information below!

This simplified pricing structure will apply to all credit/debit card orders placed with us and includes those from customers who have already registered their interest or intent to buy from any of the element14/Premier Farnell Group of companies, unless they were previously quoted a LOWER price, in which case we will honour the lower price.

If a customer has already ordered from us at a HIGHER price than those listed below we will ensure this is corrected at point of shipping to reflect the cheaper prices below.

Also other Raspberry Pi ‘bundles’ and accessories ordered and shipped at the same time as the Model B will not incur any additional delivery charges.

We hope this is clearer for our customers and as always appreciate feedback and suggestions to improve.

element14

http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi

element14 Consumer Pricing for Raspberry Pi Model B effective 12^th March 2012

Region Territory
Price (including delivery & excluding. tax)

Sales Tax

Total Price (inc. Sales tax)

Europe
UK £
£24.55

£4.91 (VAT)

£29.46

EU £ Credit Card TransactionsAustria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden
£27.25

£5.45 (UK VAT)

£32.70

Other European £ Credit Card TransactionsNorway, Switzerland, Turkey

Russia, Israel

£27.25

£38.65
Plus import VAT and duty that may be payable

Americas Mexico
$50.75

Subject to local state / provincial taxes & regulations – (please contact salestax@newark.com for details)

Canada
CA$47.00

USA
$40.00

APAC
Australia
Au$ 50.95

Au$3.80

Au$54.75

China
RMB 265

RMB 39.95

RMB 304.95

Hong Kong
HK$ 309

0

HK$ 309

India
Rupee 2550

Subject to applicable national and local taxes and input duty

Korea
Won 70050

Malaysia
MYR 145

0

MYR 145

New Zealand
NZ$ 63.21

NZ$ 7.24

NZ$ 70.45

Singapore
SG$ 55.00

SG$ 3.15

SG$ 58.15

Thailand
Baht 1492.50

Baht 103.95

Baht 1596.45

Rest of World
Subject to destination, delivery, tax and duty will be confirmed at point of order

Rev 1 07.03.12 element14

1.     Why have you changed your prices now?

The incredible demand for Raspberry Pi and discussions with our thousands of customers has highlighted the need to simplify pricing, making clearer any additional charges and as a global distributor put these in local currency wherever possible to help our customers. We want to make our pricing globally transparent   in keeping with our commitment to make the Board accessible to all at a base price no higher than $35 per board. By changing our prices now, with the first delivery of reworked boards due to go out next week, we can ensure that all customers have the benefit of the new pricing structure.

2.     I placed my order at a higher price. What does this mean for me?

Your order will be charged at the new, lower prices automatically, you do not need to take any action.

3.     I placed my order at a lower price. What does this mean for me?

We will honour the lower price you were previously quoted. You do not need to take any action.

4. I am a trade customer, not paying by credit/debit card. What prices will I pay now?

Customers who have a trade account with us at any of the element 14 / Premier Farnell companies will be able to buy the Raspberry Pi model B along with their normal purchases in their own country, either on-line or via their local contact centres. Prices for these customers will be list price net of delivery or local sales tax as these vary for our trade account customers

    5. Your web site is still showing the old price? What should I do?

We have been working all weekend to get all of our local country websites updated without impacting customers, so there may be a few changes not yet finalised. Please bear with us. We didn’t want to take our websites down to make these updates and so it is taking us a little longer but all orders placed from now on will ship at the new price we promise!

   6. If I order other accessories at the same time will I pay additional shipping on those items?

Accessories that are ordered and shipped with your Raspberry Pi Model B will not incur any additional shipping charges to those already quoted for delivery of your Raspberry Pi.

And breathe…

Well, that was an incredible week.

For those of you just joining us, we have entered into licensed manufacture partnerships with two British companies, Premier Farnell and RS Components. They’ll be manufacturing and distributing the devices on our behalf, and handling the distribution of our first batches as they arrive in the country. We continue to make a small profit from each Raspberry Pi sold, which we’ll be putting straight back into the charity.

This arrangement means that we can build volume much faster than would have been possible on our own. We are no longer limited to batches of only 10k Raspberry Pis; the Raspberry Pi will now be built to match demand. Both partners have worldwide distribution networks, so wherever you are in the world, you will be able to buy from a local distributor. This will save you money on shipping, and both partners are taking preorders, or expressions of interest, for the Model B from the start. There has inevitably been some confusion around pricing and parts of the ordering process; within a few days, we hope to have a country-by-country summary of each partner’s policies, showing how the $35 price of a Model B translates into a final cost. In the meantime, feel free to share your experiences either here or in the forum.

We’ve also announced a doubling of the Model A RAM capacity to 256MB; these devices should be available to pre-order shortly.

Finally, an apology – not everyone on our mailing list received a notification of our impending launch, as it now takes about a week to mail personalized messages to each of our 100,000 subscribers. Given the large volumes our partners are able to produce, the penalty for being further back in the queue is much smaller than it would have been had we been the only manufacturer; if you place an order, we’ll do our best to make sure you’re not waiting too long.