R260 PC: Register for a Raspberry Pi from SA
Raspberry Pi, a credit-card sized computer that entered production in early 2012 after years in development launched yesterday (29 February 2012) to much fanfare and no small amount of controversy.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, a non-profit registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, announced yesterday that it had decided to enter into licensed manufacture partnerships with Premier Farnell and RS Components.
These companies would manufacture and distribute devices on behalf of the foundation. Farnell, RS, and Raspberry Pi are all British organisations.
After the launch announcement, the websites of the distributors folded under the load of the people flocking to them to place orders for the device, leading to an outcry on Twitter.
Raspberry Pi’s website also went down and has been temporarily replaced with a single static page.
Raspberry Pi distributor downtime tweet
RS Components, which operates a website localised for South Africa, released a statement following the downtime on their website, saying that the demand for the Raspberry Pi was “unprecedented.”
“With tens of thousands of customers looking to order on the RS website since the launch of Raspberry Pi earlier today, this is the greatest level of demand RS has ever received for a product at one time,” said Chris Page, general manager for electronics at RS Components.
“We clearly understand how excited customers are about this ground-breaking product and we are working closely with Raspberry Pi to satisfy this unprecedented demand.”
Only the $35 “Model B” version of the device will be sold initially, with the cheaper $25 “Model A” device becoming available later in 2012.
Raspberry Pi board and drawing
The specifications of the “Model B” version device are as follows:
- Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
- GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
- 256MB RAM
- Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
- 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
- HDMI socket
- USB 2.0 socket
- RCA video socket
- SD card socket
- Powered from microUSB socket
- 3.5mm audio out jack
- Header footprint for camera connection
- Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm
Those interested in buying one of these low-cost, small form factor computers can register their interest on the South African RS Electronics website, or try and contact one of the local distributors for Farnell.
RS said yesterday that it expects to receive the first batch of boards at its warehouses late next week, with the shipping of products on a first come, first served basis in line with customer registrations.
As deliveries of the Raspberry Pi boards arrive at RS, registered customers will be kept up-to-date with the progress on availability.
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