Final PCB artwork

liz
Raspberry Pi

November 14, 2011

As promised, here are the Gerbers (a visualisation of the printed circuit board or PCB) for the finalised version of the Raspberry Pi. I get several messages every day asking what it can possibly be that we are still working on: I hope you will understand on looking at this why the routing, which has to be quite spectacularly complicated to minimise expensive PCB features and to keep things tiny, took as long as it did! That snarl in the middle is the signal escape for the BCM2835, the chip at the heart of the Raspi. The elves have been working overtime.

Raspberry Pi Gerbers

The Raspberry Pi is exactly the size of a credit card – 85.60mm x 53.98mm. You can’t tell where the ports are from this picture, but I should have measurements and precise placements for you next week some time (Pete Lomas, who has done the insanely fiddly work on this, is away for the week for some richly deserved time away from Pi and to try to recover what’s left of his eyesight).

This design is almost certain not to change, but we have to reserve the right to make changes if the boards are poorly yielding in manufacture – so please be aware of this if you’re making a case now. We’re in the process of making a very small initial test run of what you see above (to preempt the obvious question, no, you can’t buy one), and will move to larger production when we’re happy that there are no early-life bugs. Because we can’t predict whether or not there will be any, we can’t give you a firm release date, but Pete has engineered what you see here nigh unto death, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed for an easy ride.

See if you can guess what my desktop wallpaper is now!

Edited to add: One of our forum members has mocked up a 1:1 scale card model of the board [ http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=1097.0 ], and put it next to a quarter for scale, with some components like those you’ll see on the real board laid on top. Drop into the forums to have a look and to get a feel for the size of the real thing.