Raspberry Pi on sale

The Raspberry Pi foundation have announced that boards will go on sale at 0600 GMT on Wednesday 29th February. I imagine there will be a huge scrum and they’ll sell out pretty quick (even at one per person). So it would be helpful if a few folks here could try to to buy one… either to develop on or to lend to other developers.

RaspberryPi.org will carry the formal announcement on the day, but they should be available from the shop at RaspberryPi.com Both servers will probably be hammered, so don’t be surprised if things are slow.

Countdown timer (courtesy of Ukscone’s comment on the RPi announcement page).

No surprise there:

You need to enable JavaScript in your browser!

What a disaster – at the last minute they announced that actually you’d have to buy RPi from one of two third party web sites – either Farnell or RS. Both of whose web sites went down instantly under the load. When you could get a page to load, the RS site just showed an “express an interest” page, not allowing you to actually buy anything.

The Farnell site is showing a message “Site unavailable: Our websites are currently unavailable whilst we perform a scheduled system upgrade.” The phone lines don’t open until 0800 so the real release time is 0800.

So well done – time the announcement of the sale while the site is off line being maintained. It isn’t April 1st is it?

According to Raspberry Pi on twitter, Farnell are already sold out.

How can they be sold out if their site is currently under maintenance? I shouldn’t believe something as unreliable as twitter.

Hah! :)

I think “down for scheduled maintenance” means “oh noes our web server crashed”.

I got as far as getting one in my basket in the first few minutes, but then it fell over (and continues to fall over) when I tried to login with SSL. According to Twitter, Farnell have sold out of first batch and RS don’t go on sale until the end of the week.

Currently had three slots on the Today programme (interview right now), BBC Breakfast, ‘most read’ on the BBC News front page. Video filmed in our lab on Friday.

Will be interesting if it gets to 9am and the DDOS on Farnell and RS start losing them orders worth real money…

Farnell still have them available to order – just got mine, expected within 30 days. (They are still in China at the moment).

Farnell have accepted my order for one, too. When I will get it is entirely another matter, of course!

FWIW, there are some videos (and other docs already made available elsewhere AFAICT) at element14.

I seem to remeber that Element 14 is what is left of Acorn?

Just a naming coincidence, I think. Acorn (then Element 14) was finally renamed “Cabot 2” when MSDW bought the company.¹

¹ Companies House

ordered two in Aus expected in three weeks.

Farnell’s UK site still seems to be down for me – I can’t imagine they were expecting the high traffic to last this long.

I ordered one at 08.01 via http://onecall.farnell.com which is the academic site for Farnell (and got an academic discount too). Don’t know if normal people can use that site just without discounts. However that’s now just redirecting to a ‘register your interest’ page so it’s a bit moot.

Ah, here’s the direct link that’s working for me:
http://onecall.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185?Ntt=2081185

However that’s now just redirecting to a ‘register your interest’ page so it’s a bit moot.

Yeah, the UK site seems to have come back to life now. Apart from still being a bit slow, it’s also redirecting to a ‘register your interest’ page, so I guess they’ve stopped accepting orders for now.

When you can get uk.farnell.com to load you can order (30 day delivery quoted) stock no. 208-1185 they are charging 26.55 GBP + VAT + (if order total under 30.00GBP 5.00?GBP post). RS are charging 21.60+ VAT + unknown postage. When I placed my Farnell order by phone I was told my order would be sent Mid March.

[edit] The Farnell site is just back up and it not adding a shipping cost at present!

If anyone is lucky enough to get one from the first batch and is not involved in the RISC OS port or hardware development and wants to help the RISC OS cause, we(CJE) would really appreciate the loan of one to finalise our cases and test our Real Time Clocks etc, I could then return it or loan it on to someone helping with the RISC OS port. chris@cjemicros.co.uk

Well worth a watch: http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-43236/l/harriet-green-interviews-rob-mullins-co-founder-of-raspberry-pi-foundation

Theo’s link seems to have worked for me (although I played it safe and changed it to uk.farnell.com). Thanks Theo!

I ordered mine from Farnell, just had an email telling me to expect delivery the week commencing 16/04/2012.

Reality is creeping in – my farnell order is now rescheduled to ‘expected 26th April’ – gone back 4 weeks in one day.

Seeing this on Raspberry Pi makes me wanna have OpenGL on Risc OS ! Anybody up for it ;-) !?

Reality is creeping in – my farnell order is now rescheduled to ‘expected 26th April’ – gone back 4 weeks in one day.

Another 4 days later it has been rescheduled to w/c 14th May. So the second differential of delivery date has gone negative. On the plus side I’m hoping that RISC OS will run on it by the time I get it (otherwise it’ll just be gathering dust until that happens).