Rasberry pi

[melrel]

Hey guys.  Any advice on whether we jump into this let is pass for a while.  A load of schools in UK are using this in their media and IT courses.  Sounds great.  Any ideas? Guidance?  Thanks

[GeoffS]

Quite a few threads here on raspberry pi. Here are just a few

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/suggestions/microcontroller-interfacing-to-the-industrial-world-for-rasp-pi
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/raspberry-pi-looks-like-a-pretty-good-contendor-against-arduino
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-chat/raspberry-pis-are-finally-here-and-people-are-reselling-them-on-ebay

 Try the search box at the top of the page for more.

[westfw]

A load of schools in UK are using this in their media and IT courses.

Quite a few threads here on raspberry pi.

However, this is one of the first I've seen that indicates that it's being used as originally intended (an educational tool.)
Good!

[mianchen]

They are now even "Made in UK"...

[RCMR]

They are now even "Made in UK"...

Reminds me of the proud days of BMC  -- well I hope not 

[poptones]

I just watched a Makerfair interview with eben something of the Pi folks and he said they're working with some new plant in China that will have nearly unlimited production capacity. Maybe some are made int e UK but it sounds like most will still come from China.

[nctnico]

If there is no manual labour involved there is not much advantage of having a 'product' like the Raspberry pi assembled in China. Most of the production is a matter of turning an assembly line on and wait for the PCBs to come out of it.

[poptones]

You're assuming that a production line exists outside China that can handle 20,000 units a day.

[RCMR]

And forgetting the most important (and often most noticeably missing) link in the whole process...

Quality Control.

Some Chinese companies need to learn that QC involves more than just putting a little sticker on everything that falls off the end of the production line and is not so badly damaged that it won't still fit inside the box.

[EEMarc]

You are right. My Pi needs to go back because of a soldering issue. From what I've heard, there are many more going back as well.

[melrel]

interesting comments.  Thanks guys

[tom66]

The new Farnell ones are made in Pentcoed, Wales.

[Psi]

This company in Austria will colocation your pi for free if you send it to them.
100MBit  100GB traffic

https://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/

I cant see it lasting that long, they will be flooded with people wanting free hosting.

[gxti]

It's also an incredibly stupid idea, from both sides. From what my friends who have one have said, it's barely stable enough to keep running on their desk, let alone across the pond in a "datacenter". And you can't even include storage other than a USB stick so its only real use is as a proxy. Might as well just lease a VPN or VM from a reputable company.

[Psi]

You can get 64GB usb sticks easy and ive seen 128 and 256GB on occasion.  So storage isnt too much of an issue.

But yeah, if they're unstable that would be a pretty big problem.

Send them two, one running your own custom firmware, only a few 100 lines of code needed to run the NIC and toggle a gpio when it gets a special TCP packet. Then connect that GPIO to your other pi on the reset line.
You could even add some code to enable you to reflash the usb stick remotely.

[poptones]

I can get a server at amazon that runs any software I want, has nearly infinate access to resources if I should need more, and which ocsts me virtually nothing to start out, not even the fifty bucks and six month wait for a pi.

It doesn't surprise me someone thought of offering this. From what I have seen so far, these things are useless as tits on a bull. But don't tell my customers...

[Psi]

Maybe its a bit crap/unstable with the shipped OS containing lots of extra pi features but if you wipe that and install the ARM version of debian it should be pretty stable for a colo box.