Wales | Raspberry Pi

500,000 Pis in Wales

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of this website, production of the Raspberry Pi started in China back at the start of 2012, but has been gradually moving to Wales since last September. One of our distributors, Premier Farnell/Element14, already makes 100% of its Pis in the Welsh Sony factory in Pencoed, where Pis are built under licence. The other, RS Components, is in the process of moving the vast bulk of its manufacture to Wales as well (although they will continue to make a much reduced number of Pis in China for the Far East market).

Sony’s only been making Pis for us since September, but today they announced that the 500,000th Pi has just rolled off their lines. At the moment nearly 40,000 Pis are being made in Pencoed every week, and that number is set to climb further (I have some projections I’m not allowed to share, but they did make me swallow sharply when I read them) – even at these numbers we’re still having trouble meeting demand around the world. We sold our millionth Pi in January. Soon there will be more Made in the UK Pis in the world than their Made in China cousins.

This is wonderful news for us; and it’s great news for Welsh manufacturing. I wrote a short article about our decision to move to Wales for IT Wales last week; if you’re interested in why we made the move, it’s worth a read. I apologise for the awful portrait picture.

This group photograph is of all the people at the factory who have a hand in making your Pi – I had a go at counting them with my cursor, and I came out with a fairly astonishing 68 people. Thank you so much for all your hard work, everybody (and hi, Ricky!).

Gerald Kelly, the GM of Sony’s Pencoed plant, said:

In June we scheduled 204 units per week. By July that had climbed to 10,000 units per week – this month we will achieve 38,000 output per week, and this is just the beginning! The future is about higher volumes, a second generation Pi [Liz interjects: don't get your hopes up, folks; Gerald's talking about rev3 of the original Pi, which we're preparing at the moment] and accessories such as a camera board. Current total forecast for Pi products indicate that 1,000,000 output will be achieved sometime in July this year.

We love working with the team in Pencoed; they’re always a real pleasure to visit, and the quality of the Pis they produce is superb. Congratulations all round – here’s to the next 500,000!

CNN clip

As promised, here’s the full version of the short news item CNN carried on the Quest Means Business Christmas show earlier this week.

We’ve had a great time with a couple of crews from CNN this year. We met Adam shortly after launch, and knew he had a Pi on order. He’s the guy who was demonstrating how the Pi works in the studio for Quest Means Business, and he wrote a bit about his experiences with the Raspberry Pi on CNN’s website too. He says:

Only after I got my hands on one did I realize how useful the little thing actually is. At first I was excited about using it as an introduction to Linux and to refresh my dormant programming skills. It was only after I put some media software on it that it really became part of the furniture.

My Raspberry Pi, in its Top Trumps card box finery gets used almost every day now. It has infiltrated the living room in a way that a tablet, Apple TV, laptop, or even the smallest PC never could.

Just like the Acorn Electron computer I had when I was five, it’s silent. That’s probably where the similarities end. For starters, the Pi is just 1/25th the price of my Acorn when adjusted for inflation. It can run without a keyboard or a mouse using just my regular TV remote control, and it can play any music or full HD video file I throw at it.

I’ve set this little wonder to play media from TV catchup services, the computer in my bedroom, the DVD drive in the computer in my bedroom, my smartphone and even the downloads on my flatmate’s PC.

You can read more on CNN. Thanks very much for having the patience to spend all that time last month filming us garbling the things we meant to say, and waiting until we got it right, CNN people – we really appreciate it!

Factory pictures from South Wales

A very quick set of photos taken this morning at the Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales, where Raspberry Pis are being built at a rate of around 2500 a day. Pete, Eben, Mike from Farnell and I were visiting the factory to celebrate its 20th anniversary (and the 40th anniversary of Sony in Wales). This is a bit quick and dirty – these were taken with my phone. We’ll have some nicer photos and some video of the line, the automated processes and some pictures of the whole team to show you later on, but I know a lot of you were waiting to see these today: so here they are!

Gail, doing a final visual check and packing the units into antistatic bags for shipment.

Joanne and Pam, working on final testing

Some of the larger parts are hand-mounted. Ricky is checking and soldering here.

The Raspberry Pis are produced in panels of six. This is Jane, who is very gamely posing for a picture for me.

Up periscope!

Highly magnified side view of the PoP stack, moments after exiting the oven. Note the difference in ball pitch between the RAM (top layer), and the BCM2835 processor chip (bottom layer).

Fashion plate Pete Lomas, last heard shouting: “I wish I’d brought my electrostatic clogs!” So do we, Pete. So do we.

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.