Populated boards: an update on where we are

liz
Raspberry Pi

December 22, 2011

Here’s a little something to warm your festive cockles. These are populated boards from our first run of beta devices. They’re undergoing electrical testing alongside hardware and software testing at the moment, and if all goes well, the Raspberry Pi you’ll be buying in January (or by auction later this month if they all work as they should) will be exactly like one of these.

Raspberry Pi beta board, populated

The boards you see here differ in one small detail from what you’ll be buying: the GPIO pins here are soldered on so we can run tests to make sure that everything comes out where it should.

One of the very first boards off the line

These pictures are taken with a relatively low-resolution camera by Pete. I’m dropping by his offices tomorrow (a trip of a mere 350 miles) to pick up those boards which haven’t yet been couriered around the country to the people who are doing tests on them, so I’ll have some very high-res photos ready for you in time for Christmas. I notice I don’t have any pictures of the backs of the boards in this batch, so I’ll make sure that there are plenty of those too.

Same Raspberry Pi, other end

If all the boards from this batch perform well in testing, we’ll be auctioning ten of them off; details will be available here as soon as we are confident that they’re perfect. (If they don’t get through testing, we’ll have to do another iteration, so keep your fingers crossed; I can tell you that so far, they’ve been as solid as a rock, but we’re not counting our chickens before they’ve been hatched and inspected in very great detail to make sure that they are not mutant lizards.)

Top-down Raspberry Pi

Once we’re happy that this test run is fine, we’ll be pushing the button immediately on full-scale manufacture in more than one factory. I’ll be checking in here again before Christmas with more pictures and any more detailed information I can squeeze out of the team making and testing these – ding dong merrily on high!

The beginnings of a Bramble