http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/29/raspberrypi_mania/

"Farnell spokesman Ken Leitch told El Reg: "It's been a phenomenal day. This is an incredible little computer, we knew anticipation was huge and it sold out very very quickly, within the hour. We had a massive amount of interest across different territories - half a million interactions with our site in 15 minutes at its peak."

That's a damn popular bit of kit then! Wonder if it'll really get kids into coding? I wish I had gotten into computing at school but the computer they had at school didn't even have a screen just a line printer, couldn't get my head round it at all.

I did my first programming on an ASR33 Teletype hooked, by serial thankfully, to an HP 2000E timeshared system, back in '72. I thought I was damn lucky, as most folks then did programming using punch cards on batch process systems and had to actually wait a day for their results.

I wonder how many of these will end up in the hands of kids?

My younger daughter is interested in this kind of thing, I should pick up something like this for her.

Looks like I won't get mine until the end of April. But given I don't have an actual use for it yet, it's not a huge deal.

What really irked me, was the reaction of numerous people in the comments and forum sections of their website throughout the whole process. There's the ones that bitched about the design, the ones that bitched about the production in China, about the lack of pre-orders and about them entering into agreements with RS and Farnell.

None of them seem to grasp the complexity of designing, building and selling something like that, especially when none of the people involved with it work full time on the project. 'A bunch of fucking arseholes' doesn't even begin to describe what I think about people like that.

Glad you got that off your chest Andy

Week of the 14 May they are quoting for mine. You must have been earlier in the queue than me Andy

I managed to officially express an interest at Farnell as soon as their website became useable again, and I put an order in about 5 minutes after I received their email inviting me to actually purchase one.

I'm quite looking forward to having a fiddle around with it. It's certainly more capable than previous embedded boards I've tinkered with in the past. About 6 months ago I had considered a Beagleboard to stick in the car. But the fact the Pi was so much smaller and cheaper, while still retaining much of the useful features, I thought it would probably be a better bet.

Sorry for sounding off in my previous post, the Raspberry Pi seems to have really attracted a lot of very self righteous wankers. It certainly goes to prove the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory".

/me looks at his "first 400" voucher and smiles

Do you guys have any specific projects you intend to use them for? I want one, but don't have a particular use right now. I already have a 24/7 server/NAS and a mythtv box I can use if I want something like a mini webserver.

I have to say I'm quite impressed with the Quake III demo in terms of performance.

I'm using it as "just another really interesting target" for our distro: http://www.merproject.org/

For RasPi, I'll be the mentor for using the Mer build systems.

Looking at their forum yesterday it also seems to have attracted people that want to run Windows on it, why?

Well with a touch screen wired up to it, it might making an interesting Windows 8 device.

Though I thought Microsoft were restricting Windows on ARM to OEMs, so that might be a bit challenging.

Given that Windows on ARM is supposed to be getting Office, it would also make for an interesting low cost desktop machine for the office. But again, only if you could actually get WOA on it.

Maybe their plan is to ensure that the RasPi adheres to the Microsoft ARM "secureboot" lockdown?

In the front of my is an in car pc to give the functionality for playing music my empeg gave me, but also coupled to a dvb-t tuner for DAB radio and OBD and maybe some bespoke PIC circuits for car stats/information display.

I can't see myself getting one, but then I can't see any of it's alleged target market (kids) going for one either.

I've got a couple of things I'd like to try.

Firstly I'd like to take a crack at whole house audio. I'd look at using something like Shairport and a set of amplified speakers in each room, but also look at running something like Softsqueeze as well to cover all bases. I can use either the built in ethernet or a WiFi USB dongle to make installation straightforward, instead of running line level audio or speaker cabling through the house. I could even look at using the built-in GPIO interfacing to automatically power on and off the amplifier as and when it's being used. The cost of the R-Pi makes it the cheapest part of the whole exercise.

Other than that, I suppose I'll look at building my long awaited Empeg MK3. My Parrot Asteroid has been a serious disappointment. Great hardware and form-factor, let down by really crappy player software.

Kids themselves aren't going to buy them. I think the plan is that their schools will be. Even if R-Pi's primary goal fails, the nerds of the world will be buying them a dozen at a time!

I can imagine the BeagleBoard lot must be spitting feathers.

Absolutely, which I guess is not a bad thing but not what they intended

I managed to order one through farnell shortly after they started accepting orders.

My estimated shipping mate is week commencing the 12th March, the only shipping date I've received was in the initial order confirmation, I understand quite a few people have received other emails with revised shipping dates.

Yeah, that's a bit amazing. No first article inspection at the factory? No test plan that checked even one unit manually before they ran 10,000 down the line?

I'd be very surprised if the factory weren't rather nervous about the Raspberry Pi guys (who obviously have never done any manufacturing before), who probably assured them they didn't need any testing and just to ship the boards out...

Given that it's dual-sided SMT on that board, the rework is going to be manual and they'll likely damage some boards whilst they're doing it. Not cheap either (plus shipping all the boards back and forth another time), which is even more of a concern when you're not making anything on the product in the first place.

Ouch.

Interesting take.

It sounds to me (from the limited information in that article and the necessarily one-sided info from the RasPi forum) like the *factory* cocked up. They were given a spec for a component and used the wrong one.

"where we’d specified jacks with integrated magnetics in the BOM and schematics, the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks"

I'd say the RasPi guys (who may not have the experience to know that when you pay someone to do a job, and quite possibly outsource QA to them too... will still screw up) are the ones who should be nervous about the factory - and indeed maybe what you find amazing is actually that they trusted them to do the complete job.

I'm interested in why you say the RasPi guys told the factory "they didn't need any testing and just to ship the boards out..." and not the factory telling the RasPi guys?

In my experience (and granted, it's a million miles away from this environment) suppliers rarely say "hey, there's a good chance we'll screw up, I hope you have a plan to test our products match your spec before you trust us enough to ship"... quite the contrary.

I think what Hugo means by "have never done any manufacturing before" is that perhaps they don't realise when a price is too good to be true. There are contract manufacturers who work the way you expect, and who have the forces of contract law ranged against them if they don't. But there's also an underworld, wherein you can get things manufactured much more cheaply if you're prepared to stand over them the whole time keeping them in line. In the underworld they will replace specified components with cheaper ones they had lying around if they think it will still get past board testing -- prototype Trekstor Vibezes came back with a zero-ohm resistor instead of the very-low-value one for current sense. "Experienced" production managers know to watch out for this, in the same way that experienced project managers know who to bribe in tinpot dictatorships.

The unfortunate thing is that the cost difference is so wide, that over time the underworld always wins.

Peter

It's very possible that the factory swapped a part out without the RasPi guys being aware, but that doesn't actually happen that often - usually they will ask to swap it and send a datasheet, but if they buy an incorrect part the customer isn't going to pay for it, so this isn't so common.

First article inspection is pretty important because you're very likely to get 10,000 units identical to the first one - that's how factory lines are designed to run. Possibly their testing was booting from an SD card and checking a screen picture came up, which would have caught the more tricky issues like BGA soldering problems, but wouldn't have helped a network issue.

Factories tend to push hard for testing because if there's a problem with the goods they ship, it comes back to them and it's a PITA. They would like to know, with some certainty, that they are shipping working product.

By the sound of it the biggest issue is their naivety. We do contract production of clothing for mostly UK retailers, it's sometimes shocking how little people that may have been in the clothing business for decades actually know about the manufacturing side of things. Even when you know the business it's not always a given that you're going to get what you specced, we had an incident a few years ago where a supplier in China made a whole batch of jeans with rivets that were not guaranteed nickle free. This was not picked up by anyone, including our paid for inspection service in China, till the merchandise hit the stores and someone had a reaction to the rivet. A very costly mistake.

Did the Empeg team do the deal with Rio purely for the money, or the access to manufacturing and marketing capability? I guess the same sort of thing happened at slimp3, manufacturing your own kit is never easy.

I find this whole problem interesting so I did some digging.

Summary:


More detail on QA: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/781#comment-14934



This link mentions a remote-testing rig which, as you suggest, doesn't seem to verify the network (in fact it doesn't sound like it even boots the device... would need to dig more)

Also: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/781#comment-15451



So given the level of transparency of this team I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. It does sound like a factory cockup and it's hard to see anything the RasPi team could have done differently short of sending someone to China to oversee the factory.

And there in lies the solution, they should have either run a limited quantity to ensure that what would come off the production line will work or had somebody out there to test one. If they'd done this, they would have spotted that there was a problem with 10,000 of them before they committed. If they subsequently received the production batch and they didn't work, then they could go back to the factory and point fingers.

I'm with Hugo and Peter, this is a situation that has been caused by Raspberry Pi not checking that their production build will function correctly, the way they've done this can either be put down to inexperience or lunacy.

This is part of the reason that we have our our pick and place setup, we can assure quality, our PCB's are bare board tested for connectivity.

This reminds me of us recently purchasing some 7 segment drivers for a product that we build for another company, we ordered them from china, they arrived with the correct part number on the devices. We put one on a production board and low and behold it didn't work, the numbers were coming out all wrong. Turns out the chinese manufacturer of this device had copied the (long out of production) original part but had labelled the standard inputs part with the BCD part variants.

Baring in mind that this was a large through hole device, we would have been in a whole heap of doo-doo if we'd just blindly trusted what the parts were and had them soldered into production devices.

Bottom line is, never trust any electronic component that is sourced from china, chances are it's not what you think it is.

It would have taken ONE sample unit to verify this problem. With a handful of samples they could have also torn at least one down completely to verify against their BOM. Before running 10k.

Really that's not even a mistake a first timer should/would make. They were probably just busy and excited and didn't bother with due diligence.

Not sure what bit of "We received one initial small test batch of boards... they tested fine" and "The first production batch had a different jack in place" you missed?

They did exactly what you say you would have done.

The factory appear to have swapped components between the initial test batch and the production run.

Maybe I should assume you were just a little too busy and excited to fully check the links (which I admit seem to only point to the general vicinity of the relevant comments) before you posted your analysis?

I have nothing to do with RasPi... but if you're going to use my post to call them inexperienced lunatics then I think I should at least verify the logic you use.


They did - so actually what you would have done *didn't* solve the problem. So given your first solution was the same as theirs does this following quote apply to you? If not, why not?



Your second suggestion:

is apparently they are now doing with a Farnell/RS rep in china. So again, they did exactly what you'd have done - how does that justify the labels you applied?



Yes, indeed - and I'm not seeing much evidence that they did.

You mentioned Hugo and Peter's posts - actually that's not how I read Hugo's posts - he very much assumed that the factory would be professional - Peter on the other hand almost certainly nailed it.