And breathe... - Raspberry Pi

Congratulations on the launch! Great to have the old site back.

Apologies for posting here, but (since the posts are too many for quick reading) if you know of a page/section where the problem of “getting the Pi in the hands of developers” is being addressed, please post the URL here. Thanks!

I hope that this poll can help: ” Were you (RaspberryPi Developer) able to buy a unit?”
http://raspisoft.org/showthread.php?tid=1

Welcome back. That was some pub lock-in!

I think it’s fair to say that they definitely deserved it though. Even if it did carry on for several days.

Congrats on getting through a wild launch! I know we’re all wishing you much success in the months to come as we now anxiously await receipt of our Pis instead of anxiously waiting for an announcement.

Is there any indication of how many units have gone on sale in the UK itself?

We don’t have good-quality releasable figures by territory yet, but it looks like total order volume is in the many tens of thousands of units.

Oh, no… And I only just registered my interest at RS Components… It’s really great to see that big an interest, though.

Now that there’s a decent figure of how much interest there is in this, can you estimate how large the second batch will be?

Do we have an ETA on model A? Considering both the backup in getting this one to the US and the RAM increase, I’m considering waiting for the A.

Definitely would be good to get pre-orders going on Model A. The distributors should be trying to gauge demand for the two models as they go to manufacture.

True. We’re building a run of Model As in the UK next week for qualification purposes, and will try to make them available for pre-order as soon as we know the design is solid.

Very nice! :)

I got a call from the Korean branch of farnell (element14.co.kr) telling me that they couldn’t fill my order immediately, and that they’d have a unit for me in July at the earliest, and more likely in August. There’s one data point.

Experience up to now has been awsome. Thanks guys. Although slightly frantic and confusing at 6.01 AM the other morning. And RS components were fab today after accidentally sending my “thanks for registering thingy” in German.

They did that to me as well. I’m in Tennessee- I don’t speak no Germanic speech!

They were well nice in the online customer service chat window. Full apology for the wrong language email, and explained exactly what the email said. top marks for customer service an all that.

Brilliant – that’s really good to hear.

I registered interest twice on the RS South Africa section of the site with no direct feedback yet. It seems the local office was not briefed at all on the product and only knew about it because I wasn’t the first to phone in to ask.

For those complaining: what was the alternative? Before the announcement I was trying to make sense of how the Foundation would source fundsto ramp up production in anything but small steps.

And please: fix spam free wordpress. Mostly for me it fails.

I filled out the RS Components interest form at about 6.10am (BST) on “Pi-Day”, but I haven’t had any kind of acknowledgement email back from them (either at the time, or since). I wonder if I entered my address incorrectly, or the form didn’t submit properly somehow?

If so, and I have to place another order: for all I know, I could be waiting months – d’oh!

That said: many thanks for all your hard work, team :-)

I’m in a similar boat. I must admit I found the experience of trying to order a board with RS very disappointing.

Still no word from RS for me either. Their handling of the whole situation has been shambolic. There was no word that getting registers of interest was how they were handling orders, so I spent the first couple of hours refreshing their website as I assumed it was a mistake.

They seem to be making amends now by actually communicating with potential customers via Twitter, but as a lot of people who registered still don’t seem to be getting emails, it seems to be a case of too little too late. Wish I’d have ordered with Farnell now.

Not a reflection on the Raspberry Pi team at all, but more than a little frustrating and disappointing :(

Same situation here – except I was in at 0601
No email from RS. I think it went through, but time will tell.

my email message was in my gmail spam box. I assume because it was in german

Their website said that acknowledgement e-mails should have gone out by end of Friday and as I hadn’t received one I called them today – they are now saying it could take up to a week to send them out!

I got one last night at 23:29. Hopefully this means I’m in with a chance of a batch 1 Pi. That would be awesome, but I’m not banking on it. :)

06:04 on the RS site – no message from them either when I “expressed interest” or on Friday – when their site said they’d let everyone know shipping dates.
Absolute shower!
Now I don’t know whether to register with Farnell and be at the back of the queue.

But despite that – what a launch, eh? Shows the hidden enthusiasm of the geeks who aren’t powered by marketing hype. You chaps should be thrilled.

my one on the day hasn’t come back but I re-register interest and got a reply in a day… weird…

Can you please please please get Farnell to take that more expensive double-shipping (first from china to europe/america depending on where would be most pointless for your actual address) record #2081347 off their website?

2081347 is cheaper than 2081185 in many regions. The problem is not the price but the description / fact that it exists at all.

I rang farnell, this is NOT A RASPBERRY PI.

This is the broadcom chip that the pi uses.

And it shouldn’t be on the website, because they don’t actually sell it – we think it was a labelling error somewhere. Again, this is something that’s being cleaned up next week.

Glad to see the site back as we know it – has been odd f5ing & just seeing the same script.

Wish you all well & hope licensing works out well for you (and selfishly that they ramp up production quickly!)

Welcome back and thanks for all the hard work!

Woefully understocked, still can’t order, but you had to ask for more guerrilla marketing. It’s becoming a running gag. Raspberry Pi: the computer you can’t buy. But hype you can.

Do call your local RS & Farnell distributors – from my personal experience and from what i read from the others, they are helpful and will aid you in ordering one.

Unless you live in Denmark, where neither company were aware of the existence of the Raspberry Pi or even that is would be available to private individuals…

It wasn’t until after noon that they found out that perhaps they should start accepting orders from people without a registered business (in Farnells case, not sure when RS stopped asking for the name of the company as a required field…).

P.S. Spam Free WordPress is broken beyond belief

@Told you so: Some ways that companies have approached this demand problem:
1. Introduce products at “squeeze everything from fans/early adopters” prices that keep demand to manageable levels, then drop the price and grow volume as demand is better understood and volumes grow; or,
2. Have a pile of cash either from vulture capitalists expecting to turn their money around quickly, or from executing (1) a couple of times before – this lets you ramp up to large volumes straight away; or
3. The “Olympic ticketing” approach: Let world+dog sign up, then draw a ballot for first release units; or
4. Adopt an opaque, secretive development process, so that the launch is necessarily confined to people in some favoured inner circle; let word of mouth build sales volume after the soft launch.

Are these approaches in keeping with Raspberry Pi’s goals as a charity? Which would you pick, or what’s your better alternative for handling manufacturing, ordering, and distribution at scale?

Personally, I think the “its incredible popularity led to an instant backlog of orders” vibe beats a “they said it was $35 but it’s $70 to special people initially, man what a bunch of hype” vibe. Ramping production volume starting from zero cash flow was always going to be tricky; I hope that RPi’s chosen approach turns out well. My order is underway but very likely not in the first batch; patience is a virtue.

I criticized the overabundant advertising before and Liz told me that that was “extraordinarily graceless”. My more detailed followup explanation, which included the words “woefully understocked”, was deleted from the forum. Other forum members promptly offered to tie me naked to a lamp post with a raspberry pi painted on my chest to humiliate me. That
comment still exists. Suffice to say that I find advertising a product that can’t be bought deceptive. If I had told other people about the launch, guess how them not getting what I made them want would make me feel. Hence, I told you so.

The fact of criticising us wasn’t what was graceless; the way you expressed yourself was. I think you know what will happen if you keep it up.

@Told You So

Did you know that the Foundation didn’t spend a single penny on advertising (unless you count costs of visiting people who ask for interviews I guess), and almost everything it was totally organic (i.e. word of mouth)?

Is that over-abundant advertising you reference therefore the Foundations fault? Or should we have done a Big Brother, and banned people from talking about it?

Did you know that ‘woefully understocked’ is because the Foundation founders had to mortgage their house to build the first 10k batch, and that was all the money they could raise?

As to being tied naked to a lamp post, I don’t think that was any of the Admin or moderators saying that – just normal members of the public.

“print it out and stick it all over your school or place of work to entice people to visit our website. Spread the word”

That refers to a QR code with the foundation’s URL and is part of the front page news, less than a week from the launch that predictably left at least 90% of interested people without product. That was what I criticized. I understand the investment and the problems of ramping up with limited funds, but then don’t fuel the fire that was already burning too hot.

I did not claim that an admin wrote the lamp post bit. I do however note that a direct but in no way offensive explanation of my dissatisfaction with the release and advertising strategy was censored by an admin while what basically amounts to a rape fantasy was not. There. Does that count as “keeping it up?”

A…*WHAT NOW?* That’s appallingly dismissive of any people here who have actually experienced sexual assault of any kind. I read the post in question. It wasn’t remotely dodgy, and was clearly intended to give you a smile and help you lighten up. I am, if anything, oversensitive to this sort of thing, and it was so far from what you describe that I’m horrified to see you come out with that sort of accusation. Sorry, Told You So, but you’re banned. We don’t tolerate bad attitude, and that includes solipsistic assertions of victimhood.

That QR code was not generated by the Foundation – its was liked, so it was used, but again, that is simply word of mouth in action.

And I think with that last 2 sentences you have finally gone too far. What is with you people – you just push and push until you go to far. Every time. And now of course you will go to other forums to say how badly you were treated as the banhammer descends. Goodbye.

For context, folks, OP objected a few days before launch because we published a very pretty QR code poster a fan had made. He didn’t like the suggestion that people should put it up in their schools or workplaces, because he thought it would mean he’d have a less good chance of being at the front of the queue. He’s since changed username to add comments here, but we remain unimpressed.

And I was looking forward to my first use of the banhammer (not really – weapons of last resort really). But couldn’t find it in the menus. And I was trying to do it during the commercial break of a ancient episode of Poirot.

“Did you know that ‘woefully understocked’ is because the Foundation founders had to mortgage their house to build the first 10k batch, and that was all the money they could raise?”
The last part of that is a lie because plenty of us are willing and able to raise money for raspi.
The founders have denied us this claiming that they HAVE funding.
Unless they add a donation button on this site we will regard them as bathing in funding and able to deliver whenever they like.

We did not want to take funding before we had boards in our sweaty hands – I’ve seen enough enterprises like ours never actually get as far as hardware, despite the best of intentions, and we didn’t want to be accused of ripping people off if that happened to us. We’ll be adding a donate button next week (I am holding off on that until our suppliers work the wrinkles out of their systems) – I can assure you that none of us is “bathing in funding”, although doing that sounds absolutely peachy.

Please do not accuse our moderators of lying. It’s puerile. We like people to be civil here, and bad attitude will get you banned.

“We did not want to take funding before we had boards in our sweaty hands – I’ve seen enough enterprises like ours never actually get as far as hardware, despite the best of intentions, and we didn’t want to be accused of ripping people off if that happened to us.”
Thats the difference between taking donations and taking preorders. Donations would not necessarily go to making boards, but to administration. For example: Why are you, the founders, spending time on answering FAQ-category questions like “where do i order”? Are there not other people that can do, while you do more important stuff. There are discussions where the founders input is appreciated, but how many of your answers is more then routine replies?

“We’ll be adding a donate button next week (I am holding off on that until our suppliers work the wrinkles out of their systems) – I can assure you that none of us is “bathing in funding”, although doing that sounds absolutely peachy.”
That will be most appreciated and I for one will donate, even if it is unclear if Raspberry Pi devices will ever reach me. At a very least it will help showing decision-makers that there is interested in this kind of hardware.

“Please do not accuse our moderators of lying. It’s puerile. We like people to be civil here, and bad attitude will get you banned.”
I agree that the word “lie” is a bit strong. But you have to agree that there is a contradiction in saying that you have trouble funding the project while also turning available funding away? You Liz even stated that you have the funding you need. You either have the funding you need or you don’t – it cant be both.

I do not want a device like Raspberry Pi out of self interest, and I do not mind sponsoring even a project that may fail. About half of mankind do not have the resources to by a standard low end PC and internet access. A 35$ Device will enable a large group of people to afford a computer and possibly also internet access (which is useless without a computer). Remember the “revolution” that occurred with low cost home computers like Atari and Commodore? It had one explanation only: a radical shift in the cost of a computer, enabling people that previously could not afford a computer to buy one.

here, which was a frustrating, failed, time wasting “launch.”. Besides, #4 is what essentially happened given how the team handled things, from the false .com store, the surprise licensing, the set your alarm announcements, etc,.

There was nothing wrong with coming up and listing the rules as people asked: preorder to gauge response, sending the list to distributors, holding as production ramped, releasing in bulk or as the production rate became known such that ETAs would be known. None.

The objections to the preordering was absurd and yet that proposal was repeatedly rejected, except that is essentially what is happening now.

The foundation themselves were entirely unable to do pre-ordering – we don’t have the capacity. RS and Farnell do have that capability. The community asked for preordering. We gave you preordering. And yet we are still at fault?

“just remember what it /could/ have been like if you hadn’t put the sales load onto Farnell and RS. ”
There would probably be less whining. Clear rules DO promote clean behavior. I read many times that nobody gives any solution how this all could be handled better. So here is solution:
1. Sell first 10K batch through raspberrypi.com store. I’m sure this store could handle the traffic, it’s just one simple page. Farnell and RS stores are complicated, didn’t have raspi on frontpage and thousands of user downloading all those images and using search killed their servers (I know what I’m saying, I had to optimize some pages like this, it was possible for rs and farnell to handle the demand only if they replaced their front page with static page containing two links – to RPi and normal store). Rpi store was simple, dedicated to one product and handled by company with multiple servers in multiple locations.
2. Tell everyone with big bold letters, that they should expect that there will be problems with buying rpi and most people won’t get one. Small post down the page in comments section is not a good place for this. RPi Foundation had 100000 people in mailing list. They said they are experienced in electronics and business methods, so they SHOULD expect that there will be much more demand than they can handle (also they stated that they know it already).
3. Only when first batch was sold and everyone was notified that it was sold out (by post on page), they should notify everyone that new batches will be available thorugh Farnell and RS. They should also speak more with them and iron out all kinks before announcing it. Again, there was no information what happens, nobody knew anything and some people were able to order RPi but most of the people didn’t know who can order and what the rules are. This creates atmosphere of injustice.
In hindsight – all problems were caused by lack of communication. RPi team underestimated demand by order of magnitude. I know they could only finance 10k boards, but they should have taken precautions and warn people CLEARLY that they can’t meet demand.
As for the reasons for such a hihg demand, this “note” sums it up nicely: http://www.thesinglestep.org/thoughts/rspi/ . Unfortunately that post wasn’t distributed before launch :(.

I think banning *told you so* was a bit excessive. He had an opinon, which however unwelcomed, was simply that: an opinion.

Accusing people who disagree with you of “rape fantasies” is not the simple expression of an opinion. If you look around here, you’ll see plenty of opinions being expressed. We welcome them all. We do not welcome rudeness, and we do not tolerate it in our community. He’d already had a warning in the forums; we do not hand out warnings more than once.

In a kind of perverse way having haters like this means the R-Pi is a success. If nobody cared then that would be worrying.

Loving the launch, loving the success, and loving the support.
In a few months time (hopefully) supply will match demand after the initial surge and all this handbags at dawn bickering will be over.

I’m now looking forward to seeing what the people smarter than me can do with the R-Pi.

What a roll-a-coaster? So now we look at the results in the cool calm light of day. The announcement, roll out … and a lot of abuse from ill informed, unhappy punters. I’d defend the Foundation from a majority of the Internet prattle. Palming the manufacturing and distribution off to FEC and RS was a key move BUT they will not be involved in the buy one donate one idea. Given the experience of the sale of the first ten units and then known demand for the first 10k units why not sell them at 2 or 3 times the price – the market would bear it and finance a lot of the good charitable work! A missed opportunity!

I’ve tried to purchase a raspberry pi at the 6am launch, but when I got to either sites during the ddos attack, all I could do was sign up for information. There wasn’t any way to buy it. Maybe I just wasn’t lucky enough?

On another note, I thought the idea was to get the first batch of devices in the hands of developers to bootstrap application development for the device. How was this launch supposed to accomplish that?

Honestly, we had absolutely no idea that the demand was going to be this huge. We still don’t have figures, but it looks like there was considerably more than ten times the interest than we had boards to satisfy. (*Considerably* more.) On our original model, we’d assumed that only hacker-types were going to be interested. It seems we made a mistake there; that said, it’s not a mistake that’s upsetting me hugely. This sort of demand is just amazing for the charity.

Looks like the RPi is becoming the new must-have worldwide.

It’s almost like offering preorders or even unpaid expressions of interest would have been beneficial for you ;)

Liz, I find that a little disingenuous to say the least.

Up above you say you had 100,000 e-mail subscribers. What do you think they were doing? Spectating?

I have to say that commercially your launch was a disaster. I realise that you guys have spent thousands of man hours building the R-Pi, but your (potential) customers wasted far more than that (100,000 x 2 = 200,000). Instead of trying to find out what the real demand was likely to be (I guess you probably had a good idea), you just kept pushing the product until demand was probably ten times more than supply.

And don’t think you can hide behind the fact that you are a charity. You are clearly trading and you are asking people for their money in return for your product. Protesting that it is all in a good cause (and I have serious doubts that the product will make any difference in UK schools where there are already large numbers of compters per pupil but very few teachers who can teach programming) is no excuse for poor customer management. And blaming RS and Farnell for the problems when you are controlling (a) the hype and (b) the production is beneath contempt.

Disingenuous? Why? Demand far exceeded capacity. And by far, I mean far far far.

How could we predict that? It’s all very well saying we should have predicted it, but how? Given the funding available? What else could have been done?

Many people claiming what a disaster the launch was. I sort of disagree. It launched, lots were sold, and there is now a distributor agreement in place that means much larger batches can be made much more quickly. And nobody has come up with an alternative plan (that would have worked) that could have been put in place by a charity with NO paid employees.

I think its safe to assume that every person who is on your mailing list will buy at least one product. 75% worst case.

and why the fsck did you go to RS? the company who NEVER wants my hobbyist business for 10 years, but sends reps weekly to me at work to get a great (2%) discount if we buy more stuff(!). RS rapes people on shipping as well.

why not rapid?! you might as well have gone to digikey.

James, I thought you would be the touchy one who would respond to the word “disingenuous”. It is disingenuous if you ask people to sign up to a mailing list so that they can be notified, and then you don’t use that mailing list. It is disingenuous to have a mailing list with 100,000 people who have expressed an interest and then feign surprise at the level of demand. It is disingenuous to hide behind the charitable status of the R-Pi foundation when you are actually offering a commercial transaction (gives us your $$’s and we will send you a board) – the fact that you are doing it for little or no profit is largely irrelevant, lots of businesses lose money. It is disingenuous to say “we are just a little organisation in Cambridge” when many posters on the boards foresaw that there would be problems and offered to help. It is disingenuous to blame the problems on RS and Farnell when you were clearly hyping the product and hadn’t given them any warning of the likely level; of demand. Apart from that, keep up the good work.

@RMW5 on March 3, 2012 at 2:34 pm

“James, I thought you would be the touchy one who would respond to the word “disingenuous”.”

You Sir, are clearly a troll. Please stop bothering this blog.

Oh, and didn’t you read the bit in the blog post where Eben said that they didn’t manage to email everyone on the mailing list because their mailer was too slow? Or did you just rush in with the harsh words?

Yes, the launch was a disaster. I expected it would be hard to get one. That is why i order stickers in your webshop.

The real

Yes, the launch was a disaster. And I expected it would be hard to get one. That is exactly why I ordered stickers in your webshop months ago. Now it all turns out to be a scam since you never intended to sell R-Pi’s through that webshop…
That’s not a disaster but something completely different. I won’t say the word but suffice it to say I am utterly frustrated.

We did intend to sell Raspis through the webshop; we realised we weren’t going to be able to when we had some idea of volume. I’m sorry you’re disappointed; please email us using the address on your PayPal receipt, and we’ll send you a refund.

I don’t want a refund. I want a Pi! Just make sure we can all have a fair chance at ordering one.
Ah well, looks like i’m going to have to do with QEMU for a while.
(Despite this not so brilliant launch I am still very impressed)

Liz & the Admins – can you please collect the email addreses of those trolls and send them to RS & Farnell asking them to put those persons at the end of the reservation list ? :-)

Believe me – I am *seriously* tempted.

Yeah, I can see that working really well when the Foundation tries to sell to schools:

“What are your Customer Support procedures?”
“Simple, if anyone complains we put them on our distribution blacklist.”

http://tinyurl.com/85n3bmq

Why am I not surprised you consider doing it?

Off course you are tempted to do that. After all, it is OUR fault we got excited over imaginary promises.

The FAQ states that power supplies will be available at launch. Is this the case? I haven’t seen any. I want to make sure I’ll be able to use the device when it arrives.

You can buy power supplies from both Farnell and RS (and their subsidiaries).

This thing uses standard micro-USB for power. You can get a wall-to-USB adapter from almost any store. Then all you need is a micro-USB cable, which is also available from every electronics and department store imaginable. If you have time to was (and I am guessing that you do), then there are lots of choices from places like meritline.com and dealextreme.com, where it should be quite easy to put something together for under $5 USD.

You could even say the power supply was available before the launch! ;)

From an earlier news post on power: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/260
You need a USB power supply that can provide >= 700mA, which is above the original USB power spec of 500mA per socket. Most micro-USB phone chargers are rated for 700mA or more.

Congratulations for the Feb-29th launch!

RS-Online was first to be able to capture visits (from my location MANILA, that is) to register the buyer’s interest (no sale offered). Then early next day, the local branch (PH) I contacted still had no idea what R-Pi was. It was only at the end of the day that they began displaying an “expression of interest” page. At the start, price shown was PHP2,560 but now it is PHP2,000.

I guess I could retry RS-Online to buy from the UK branch, but I suppose you would be interested to know if the local purchase method is working.

Farnell’s (element14’s) local price increased from PHP1,860 to PHP2,000 overnight (March 1), but the PH page asks for trade account, so I can’t get past it. I tried visiting its HK (Hong Kong) page, but got only an expression of interest page.

Hope that helps. Arf arf (making Puppy sounds for PuppyLinux)…

Oh, so it’s Eben – hey, please send my/our regards to Liz (from the PuppyLinux community). Barry Kauler managed to order one unit from AU-element14 with delivery -hopefully- by March.

Liz says hi :)

Thanks for that – we’ll be asking both partners to take a look at comments of this sort next week.

Experience?
My experience was really bad!
I was happy about the news on Raspberry Pi, but when I got access the the Farnell and RS online stores i got really sad. You told me before many times that you would be shipping to Brazil.
Ok, I put my Raspberry Pi model B in the cart and then I checked out. What a deception when I realised that “Brazil” was not in the country list!

Thank you Liz and James H for all the lies :(.
I believed in you both!

Thank you Raspberry Pi foundation, for nothing.
Shame on it! :(

I think you may be looking with the wrong companies; in the Americas RS deals as Allied Electronics, and Farnell deals as Newark Electronics. You can buy it in Brazil. You haven’t been lied to shamefully, but I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.

There were a LOT of things that weren’t clear, or at least very frustrating, for those of us NOT in the UK. I do not blame you (well, maybe you trusted your partners too much, but that was it). I got to the RS page, but was completely confused by the “express interest” page. Do you fill that out to order? Were they already sold out? Do they even sell to regular consumers? I expected them to sell out fast. I expected to see the servers crash. The frustrating this was just not knowing what was going on at those two web sites. Anyways, thanks for all of the hard work. I already have mine on order in the US through Newark (I have to wait 2-1/2 months, but I am in the queue now). Hindsight is always 20/20. Thanks for the great product, and all of the hard work.

Actually you can’t buy it from Brazil. Farnell export is a mess. The Brazilian site is really outdated and many products are missing.
I checked it out 10 minutes after the announcement. Not really worldwide shipping and PayPal as promised.

I am eagerly waiting for some people to get their Pi in the mail. Soon there will be technical discussions. Much more interesting than shipping discussions.

But for the record, my Element 14 status now says mine will ship on April 3rd. Yesterday, it said the ship date was May 10th. So my Pi is coming sooner than I expected.

[Thanks to the Foundation for making this possible.]

Heh. You must have managed to get in there quite early.

I got my pre-order email from Newark/Element 14 today. I did pre-order it. Initial order acknowledgement said shipping April 3rd, then they sent an order confirmation, stating ship date of May 14. The only problem is they aren’t telling me yet what shipping expenses or taxes will be. So final cost will be determined around my ship date (according to them).

p.s. I live in Southwest Florida, if this helps with any of your stats, figures and chartered accountancy dreams.

Wait, does this mean “expressing my interest” in Farnell or RS is not the same as pre-ordering?

Congratulations on the launch and huge world wide response. Here is someone who didn’t quite get it – http://www.news.com.au/technology/that-is-one-ugly-computer-but-its-35-bucks/story-e6frfro0-1226286309105 news com au . Quite spectaculary wrong in places.

Best one I saw said that there was a cheaper version of the board called the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix.

It’s a shame that my comments to that shambles of an article haven’t been approved… lol

Same here. Perhaps she isn’t actually technologically capable, or capable of doing any sort of search before writing.

Looks like they have removed that article and replaced it with one titled “Time to eat humble raspberry Pi – Linux is NOT a processor” with the statement “NEWS.com.au published a story on Friday about a UK company called Raspberry Pi that contained a few errors which we would like to correct.” http://www.news.com.au/technology/time-to-eat-humble-raspberry-pi-linux-is-not-a-processor/story-e6frfro0-1226289027768
The new article has some inaccuracies like “The two authorised resellers Premier Farnell/Element 14 and RS Components provide bundle packages that include all the bells and whistles to make it easier for users to build their own”.

I thought that was really nice, and very decent of them – a lot of news outlets wouldn’t bother. Big kudos to Claire for stepping up.

The final price for Spain was 42 Euro (27 Rpi + 6 taxes + 9 shipping).
It is a pity that your best efforts to reduce the price are not worth because the final price increases more than 50%.
In my opinion, an important point is to reduce final shipping costs (i.e., using standard mail or other options more affordable than UPS or 24/48h guaranteed shipping).

Congrats for your incredible success!

This should be improving, we hope. We’re asking RS and Farnell to boil down exactly where all those costs go; we should have a nice big update for you next week territory by territory.

This. I’m in Australia and Farnell had two seperate listings for Model B priced at $38 (as expected) and $50. It wasn’t really clear what I would be buying for the $38 one with random crazy ungoogle-able acronyms (ie few characters long, no context) but the $50 one had a photo. At checkout it ended up being $55 (10% tax on things like this in Australia).

I don’t mind paying $55 as a premium to get one from the first 10,000 (and get it quick) but if I have to wait a month extra for new devices to be manufactured, I’ll just cancel my current order and order another one at lower cost (or maybe even a Model A)

sge
Its good to see us NZ cousins end up paying the same as you did. Mine is NZ$48.26 plus 15% GST and considering the exchange rate is 0.77, we end up getting it cheaper.

Good luck mines 38 days away.
Mark

Call farnell customer service before you do anything. It’s a mistake they are fixing it.

I think so, transport costs are very high, we’ll waiting if change it or if possible in the next shipping orders to share with a friend the transport costs, making the order of two Raspberry Pi in the same order

It’s been a bit quiet around here for the past few days. Did I miss something?

Nope. Just a complete change to the business model…

Perfect hindsight suggestion: using one of those free “run a poll” websites to ask people on the mailing list whether they were planning to buy a first run board would have given you and your production partners some rough guide as to how crazy things might get at launch.

It would also have given you numbers that you could use to gently prepare the more, erm, “emotionally involved” supporters for the real possibility that Christmas might come in May rather than March for maybe 90% of them.

The release was amazing, those distributors are not (for everyone)

It’s impossible to buy Raspberry pi in Holland unless you’re willing to pay €50 (Farnell NL minimal order excluding shipping) or you’re legally registered as a company (RS components NL)

I’ll have to be more patient, no Raspberry Pi for the Netherlands for now.

We’re working on it. Thanks for your patience.

Indeed – most of the last couple of days have involved my printing out the emails you’ve all been sending about wrinkles which need ironing out in the ordering process to wave at people. We’ll have an update for you early next week about wrinkle-removal, which is going really well; in particular, we’re working on getting you a really transparent view of exactly how costs stack up (board + tax + shipping) so nobody, anywhere, pays over the odds, and we’re making sure that everywhere sells to *everybody* not just businesses.

If any of you do think something’s a bit weird with the numbers or conditions on your order, email me (famous last words) – my address is on the contacts page up top.

Correction: both Farnell NL and RS-components NL require a VAT identification number

I have sent an e-mail with a more detailed summary of the current situation. Hope it doesn’t get swamped in the current hype! Now back to meditating

That shouldn’t be the case after next week; it’s one of the things we’e been talking to them about. Thanks for the mail; it’s very handy. (I’ve just replied to you.)

The same for Belgium here!

Congratulations on your launch! You have started the revolution people have been waiting for–even before the inception of the pi.

I wish you continued success!

Does the raspberry pi work with a 16GB SD card? if not, what is the maximum size?

We don’t currently work with some high-capacity class 10 SD cards. There are plenty of 8GB cards that work well, but I’ve not seen many 16GB cards that do. We’re working to develop a fix for this.

Are there plans to distribute the board design (schematic, layout) now that the first production run is complete?

Not yet, because not all of the chips are available in distribution. We’re working to solve that problem (another thing we’ve been doing this week); once that’s fixed, yes, we’ll be distributing the schematics.

Just one question: Do you have any power in trying to make the shipping cheaper?
I’m from Portugal and farnell is asking me €9 to ship he raspi.. this is 1/3 of the price of the product.. isn’t it too much? The foundation said the shipping would be as cheap as possible but I don’t think this is still a priority.
I’m used to import books from India throw fedex, and something like 5kg of books costs me €15..

Anyway, thank you for all your great work and for your effort. Not everything went as espected but I’m well aware that you did the possible and the impossible to make things work as well as they could.

Best regards,

Guilherme

throw = through (sorry for my english :P)

btw, In tweeter Liz sayd the difference between the price of RS and Farnell was because Farnell already included the shipping.. well it doesn’t :\

yeah… same here brother… I think 9€ it’s really a lot for shipping inside Europe… with standard posting it shouldn’t be above 2€…
Now I just have one question… I’ve already received an email to pay for it in Farnell asking me to do the payment to Farnell bank account. What should I do? Wait for news about the shipping? Will I have to do another pre-order and loose the queue?

Thanks

João Silva

It’s up to you. If it’s a lot of money to you, you might want to wait until we have figures for what’s going on next week.

It is a lot of money Liz, however when I contacted Farnell they told me that if I didn’t pay now, my order would be canceled(this would mean I would go to the ‘end of the line’, and would probably had to wait a lot more).

I think when the community said we wanted pre orders and pay in advance was because we knew the foundation didn’t had much money and this could be a way of financing the raspis so they could be made. However with big companies like Farnell and RS I don’t think its reasonable to ask for money with 2 months of advance…

Just giving my two cents.. not complaining about your work, but just reporting.

best regards

No; that’s fine, and it’s very helpful. I hope we can get something a bit more friendly sorted out next week.

I’ve already sent a mail to farnell and they weren’t very friendly.
Basically they told me it was 9 euros no matter the weight… Don’t think this fair at all. Also, we’re paying a 24/48 hours shipping service for what? My first date was at the end of March, but then received a new email saying end of April/beginning of May..do I still care if it takes 24/48 to ship or one week? If I’m wiling to wait +2 months, I’m also ok with waiting more 1 week for shipping and not having to pay €9.

What I’ve heard Liz say is that having Farnell and RS dealing with this process was an advantage because they were all around the globe so it would be cheaper to ship the raspis, but I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon.co.uk and I never pay €9.

Best regards!

Yeah, we know. Both companies doing their best to get the word out to all of their local distributors (which I am guessing are more used to setting autonomous pricing – I don’t think they were expecting the global interest), and we should have an update for you next week. I can’t promise anything, but I sincerely hope we’ll see that number come down. Certainly, once you’re able to buy in bulk, shipping costs will be pretty negligible per Raspi.

Thank you Liz :)

If you can, while contacting them try to see if it is possible to refund us if the shipping price changes (I know that for US there was an error of $20 and they did refund).

Same here :( … can’t understand how the price sky rocketed on Farnell to €42.30 almost $56. It really doesn’t make sense for Farnell to be charging 9€ per shipment, a third of the product itself. I guess we’ll be doing some charity in favor of Farnell !!!!

RS changed their “register an interest” page at some point a while after the launch. The one I filled-in posted the form back to the same page without a “confirmation”. Unfortunately, it now seems that they weren’t capturing the details that were entered during this time so I will have to re-register and end up at the back of their queue :-(

Sorry about that. I’ll mention it to them.

Yes, I also tried registering twice but haven’t heard back from them since. Are we sure they lost the info? I entered my details right at the beginning of the sale, before the servers froze.

Same here …

I think that is what happened to me – I filled in the form at about 6.10am, but didn’t get any kind of acknowledgement…

Does this mean I have to express interest / order again…?

Me too. Utter farce.

another “me too” here! It’s particularly annoying when you *think* you’ve managed to get in early (6am!) but then realise it was all for nothing. :(

I was able to express my interest on RS just before the site went down, so about 6:05.

Now you’re telling me that my expressed-interest may have been lost, and some other jacka** who didn’t get up early will now get one of RSs’ 4800 that should have been allocated to me!

About 5 minutes ago I believed the launch was an exciting period, with a few problems, now I believe the launch was just a great big cluster-f* that could have been handled a LOT better. I’m bitterly disappointed.

I too registered on RS at around the same time (06:05), spending in total just over 2 1/4 hours clicking, updating twitter and trying to find out what was going on. I too have not received an email.

Boo hoo (!) get over it, and your disappointment, you’ll get one soon enough. So there were some problems, and some inadvertent queue issues, regrettable, but nothing anyone can do about it. Some of us have the fantastic ability to use hindsight and predict that we could have done better. I very much doubt we could, and the foundation have nothing but praise from me, whilst I slowly tap my foot, and await my email confirmation, whenever that may be!

I likewise was up at 6am, and registered with RS. I was wondering why they had not contacted me.

But like the previous poster I just think – meh!
I’m sure it will all sort itself out. :o)

Thanks to all at the Foundation, congratulations on “getting the kit out of the door”.

And thanks for an exciting Wednesday watching the twitter feed. :o)

sure it could have been handled better but its over now.

Same here. RS was a big disaster (form not sent, only for business customers), Farnell was not shipping to Germany (although using de.farnell.com). So no Raspberry Pi for me the next months.

I just got my confirmation email (Saturday 23:30)

I guess it’s taking them longer than expected to work their way through the list.

Yeh I had this so many times took me around 15 tries to eventually get a confirmation screen and I started dead on 5:59am.

I still don’t know how to preorder correctly. I “registered my interest” but received no e-mail or anything. I can also go to the product page on farnell or newark and order from there, but there are many regions I can order form and it never tells me how much the shipping costs would be from there.

I live in Uruguay, from which farnell site would be better to order and how can I check the shipping cost?

Hurrah! :)

Not half. :)

Nice to have you back
I welcome the agreements you have reached with RS and Farnell.
I am pleased that you foresaw the obvious global demand for the Pi and think that in order to maintain a day job this was the only logical course of action to take.
I am however some what disappointed that your new partners did not have such foresight in preparing for the launch, to say it was a farcical and their website let the whole thing down is a bit of an understatment.
But as the saying goes “all good things to those who wait…..”
I would however like to point out a couple of things
First off there appears to be a difference in the price Farnell is selling the Pi for and the price RS is showing, are they tied in to the $35 price?
Secondly Farnell had a design engineer forum “element14” which now appears to have turned into the Raspberry Pi forum, do you still intend to actively support the “Offical” Raspberry Pi forum?

Yes, they are tied into the price; there have definitely been some initial pricing wrinkles which are being ironed out. We certainly are supporting the official forum (unlike Farnell, we don’t have enterprise-grade servers yet, so we weren’t able to come back up as quickly as they did). Head on over!

I was fairly disappointed when I saw that the distributors were RS and Farnell (names not commonly recognised in the US). I was first surprised and then slightly disappointed when I saw that they are associated with Allied and Newark. Nothing much wrong with them, but they seem much more geared to dealing with corporate entities on large, single orders. These days, DigiKey and Mouser seem much more hobbyist-friendly when it comes to shipping costs and dealing with individuals.

Anyway, I’m sure that Allied and Newark can adapt… here’s hoping they do it quickly ;)

Glad to see you back. I thought you and Liz might have just said “Eh, never mind. :) Good to see the change in distribution too. The 10K batches every couple of weeks would have made Airbus and Boeing lead times look short in comparison.

I got this today from RS in Madrid. The magic internet translators tell me it says another letter will come out this week.
Estimado cliente,

Gracias por su interés en esta revolución que ha generado el Raspberri Pi y por haberse registrado para adquirir el nuevo Raspberri Pi Modelo B en RS Components.

Hemos tenido una extraordinaria demanda de este producto. Así que para asegurar que todo el mundo interesado puede probar este nuevo concepto, estamos limitando una unidad por cliente, y le enviaremos información acerca de su solicitud en los próximos siete días. Una vez hayamos recibido las unidades y dispongamos de stock, éstas serán asignadas dependiendo del orden de llegada de registro.

Le agradecemos su espera; nos pondremos en contacto con usted los antes posible para ofrecerle cualquier novedad a este respecto.

Mine comes on May 14th :s

I ordered mine for NZ$55.50 including taxes and shipping from element14 that’s about GPB 27 which I think is reasonable down side is you need to be company but I don’t think they check so you could call yourself anything.

The “you must be a company to order” thing is something we’ve asked them (both companies) to stop doing, and they’ve agreed. It takes a bit of time for the instructions to percolate to all the arms of the distributors, but that’s something we shouldn’t be seeing, and which I hope will stop within a few days.

Going with Farnell and RS was in my opinion a very bad decision. Both only sell exclusively to businesses in several countries. I am living in such a country, and from experience both with RS and Farnell I can say they are rather unfriendly and arrogant companies. And I don’t believe they will drop that business-only behavior. They have been asked to do that for ages, and couldn’t care less.

And regarding not having to wait long, well, people who ordered early from Farnell are now getting their shipping dates moved to mid of May.

Tony, I also managed to order from element14 in NZ. I’ve got a 38day lead time, what about you?

Ive never had an issue with being a company from nz.element14, but you do need to be registered to use the service.

Mine through NZ.Element 14 is $48.26 plus our GST, and that NZ dollars inc freight (which is free when ordered via the website). So I’m not sure about your.
The part number I ended up with is 2081185.
currently they say 38 days.

Mark

Yes, I got the same 38 days but after talking to customer service it seems they don’t really know because they don’t know if / when they will get any stock (from the original 10000) or not so we may be lucky and get some earlier.

welcome back , when will the second batch be released , i missed out on the first batch both sites from wouldn’t let me on at 6am lol , would ebay have crashed if farnell and rs sold rapsberry pi from ebay , patiently waiting for a raspbeyy pi :),

As soon as possible. Orders for parts for the second batch (which is around ten times bigger than we could have afforded to make ourselves – this is why we went with a licensed manufacture model) went in on Wednesday.

Good news !
As i remember from the discussions in January-February, the 2nd batch was supposed to be way larger than 10k, so ~ 10x that number means that we’ll all be able to get one.

RS & Farnell better prepare for the 2nd DDoS wave in the day the “one-per-person” limit is lifted.

Welcome back and congratulations on the launch. I had visions of you all slumped in the pub, more unconscious than not and wondering what day it was.

It was just a leeeetle bit disturbing to watch the Farnell server choke to death on the volume of traffic … I managed to log into my account, got as far as the RasPi page and …. nothing.
… Same thing with RS (their traffic hit normal daily peak *4 within minutes)

[Shrugs] It was kind of fun (?) to be there, if not entirely unexpected.

I guess that I’ll have to wait for the next production run before I get mine.

The DDOS was no fun at all for me; I was sitting in front of my computer watching what was happening in a degree of panic, and a million grumpy people who’d either stayed up late or woken up very early in the morning tweeted and emailed their dissatisfaction in the very loudest of terms. I have been called things in the last few days that I have never been called in my life before…

I think JamesH may have pub pictures. I deliberately didn’t bring a camera because I was pretty sure I’d end up spilling something on it; I was quite shaky by the end of the day due to caffeine and insults!

Don’t take the insults to heart Liz, people will get over it. Once the Pi’s start shipping there will be waves of gratitude rolling your way.

Wow. I am sorry that you were insulted. I was certainly a little grumpy at the pages that RS was throwing at me (and I imagine everybody else was grumpy too), but that is no reason to insult a lady. On behalf of the internet, I apologize for your treatment. Please forgive us.

Especially since it wasn’t the last Pi available, it was the launch.

Anyone could see that with the numbers, only the first 10k were going to get one, no matter who its distributed.

I too extend the apologies on behalf of those who can’t or won’t.

Mark

Fun was used in the _ironic_ sense, and I can sympathise entirely.

I can also imagine the chaotic hell that you all went through – just remember what it /could/ have been like if you hadn’t put the sales load onto Farnell and RS.

I hoped but never expected to be able to pick up a Pi this week, so no grump on my part, and they do say that a rocky launch is a good sign.

Welcome back, and congratulations with the launch! Was a great success, even if we did all partake in a DDOS! lol. Managed to get my slice of the Pi ordered, and can’t wait to play with it – due to be delivered around my birthday too, which will be a lovely treat! Once again, well done and good luck!

I managed to make my way through the DDOS and through to ordering it but unlike all of the other posts i have read i have no estimated delivery date and it says its still in processing status. I’m just wondering if i will be getting it in this batch or whenever the pre-orders are going through ?

Does anyone read the fine print when they were ‘Registering their interest”? We can now all look forward to getting spammed weekly by these companies.

“By providing your contact details you are agreeing for your details to be used for marketing purposes by companies within the Premier Farnell Group.”

I read that one too as I was “expressing my interest”. What is the assurance that will not be spammed to death? I’m hopping RasPi foundation made it clear to the 2 distributors not to spam us.

Let’s not make an issue where there is none. At the worst you’ll receive an email newsletter once a week or so, which can be unsubscribed from in two clicks. Much like any other online retailer.

:) that was a good ride. I got drunk on a Tuesday night (Michigan,US) waiting for 1am then I don’t remember…. And today I found out that mine unit will ships on… God knows when but I happily pay for it :)
Thx for a ride, my kid is waiting for her first programming lesson in… python? (i prefer java so we will see)

As soon as I got my daughter (5yo) to start using raspberrypi (in one way or another) , I will send you some pics. THX

To say I was disappointed on Wednesday morning, is a massive understatement – I’ve been following the development of the R-Pi for the last 12 months and banging on about it to anybody that will listen! Having said that, i think most of us out there realise there was always going to be issues with the release of something so that was so eagerly anticipated – by almost everyone it seems!

I will bide my time I suppose – what else can I do?! My disappoint on missing on Wednesday was only matched by the sheer joy on the faces of my A-Level Computing students as they laughed at me as I staggered into school on Wednesday morning, bleary eyed and empty handed….

Keep up the good work guys!

I’m really sorry you missed out. We were hoping it’d be big, but it’s actually been a bit of a monster – there was absolutely no way we were anticipating this level of interest. (So much interest that Chinese state television rolled up today to do some filming of the board.) I was hoping it’d make a bit of an impression in the UK news, but it got far more coverage than we’d been hoping here, and went global very quickly; my uncle in Malaysia called in surprise to say he’d just seen Eben on the TV, some friends in India mailed saying the same thing…

Roller coaster isn’t the half of it. We’re thrilled, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t also totally terrifying. It’s actually good for you guys outside the very short term, though; it means that bulk is going to mean BIG bulk, which is great news.

I, too, was disappointed that I did not manage to secure one of the first 10 000 Raspis, but I will probably remember the ddos at launch rather fondly. I had actually set an alarm and got up to order, fully expecting that I would not actually get one. I think that history will remember this little computer as a turning point for computing worldwide. I am encouraged to see the ongoing effort by the foundation to set terms for the distributors such that they keep price and shipping inline with the foundation’s purposes for the board. Take heart, you may have created a monster, but it is a monster with incredible potential. I am sorry that so many have not been able to empathise a little better with your situation, you have certainly not deserved the abuse that you have received over the launch. I, and the people that I have told about the Raspberry Pi, will wait untill we can get one. (or three, I haven’t quite decided yet.) It is worth it.

Hi Guys, I understand the Lic. Agreement needs to make a profit for their involvement, but do u have agreements to stop them from over profiting. I know you will find out the pricing from each company, but there site has Free Shipping advertised but they jack the price up $17 (for shipping to Australia) + tax. If I wanted to buy more than one i would be paying shipping for each item instead of saving $$. I would prefer $35 + tax(if i must) and then have the option from slow to fast shipping to save $$ on bulk buys. Thank you guys for all your hard work and look forward to getting my belated Christmas present soon ;)

Hi Reuben – yes, we do. Eben’s and my answers in this thread should help answer your questions; we’re still waiting on some data about how things are meant to be being managed, which both companies are being great about getting us.

@Reuben – there are two different RPi line items on element14’s AU site: one is $50.45+GST, the other is $38 + GST. They are listed under different categories: the cheap one under “MCU / MPU / DSC / DSP / FPGA Development Kits”, the expensive one under “Analog / Power / Sensor / Wireless / Lighting Development Kits”.

You ought to be able to get them to change your order to the cheaper part. No idea which would arrive sooner. :-)

I was told from Farnell Germany that the cheaper item was the CHIPSET only!!
I guess you don’t want the chip alone… I wonder why it is on sale anyways.

It’s odd. The chip isn’t available for sale like this so I assume its a Farnell mistake somewhere.

Congrats on the launch. I have been following Raspberry Pi for over a year now and it’s been exciting. Now all I have to do is wait until the model B arrives in the mail. I can’t wait to see what everyone is going to do with theirs………This is going to be the awesome next step.

Congratulations on the incredible launch! It’s really great to see the foundation getting all this attention.

Do you have any idea how confident Farnell (UK) are about delivery dates? I had an email on Wednesday confirming stock allocation with estimated delivery of the week of the 12th March – I’m obviously really happy that I managed to get an order in but I don’t want to get my hopes too high if that date is really unlikely…

Thanks for all your hard work!

Absolutely. I would like to know the answer to this. I had a similar email confirming delivery w/c 12/03. I did manage to put my Farnell (uk) order in around 8 a.m. (after F5’ing for two hours).

Interestingly, my order was placed at roughly the same time as yours (8.01 in my case) so that does at least imply some level of consistency…

Congratulations. This is an amazing achievement. Very nice to see the forums back.

and thus the pi was born into a wild and fierce world, to test to strenght of bandwidth all around (of nerves and servers *g*)

congratulations on a tremendous start :-)

i have been waiting for this moment quite some time. so sad that your distributors didn’t live up to their part. of course i was also very frustrated in the morning after way to little sleep and then trying to find my way through the PiDOS attack. because i was hunting for the “buy here” page i actually didn’t enter my details in the RS “register interest here” form for some hours after hunting frenetically in my sleep deprived state… haven’t heard from them since…
well i guess i won’t be lucky and won’t be getting any pi in the foreseeable future :-(
i’ve read somewhere that RS only plans to sell in the UK first, is that correct???

‘f course i’ll be staying around to maybe get lucky another time (hopefully with model A + B).
really awesome you managed to upgrade the A to 256 mb, btw :-)

now, as i am not so fond of either farnell or rs at the moment, do you have any plans of somehow bringing another distributor into the boat, so i don’t have to support one of those two????

> i’ve read somewhere that RS only plans to sell in the UK first, is that correct???

Both companies trade under different names in different territories.

Premier Farnell trades under the name Farnell in Europe, Newark in the Americas and Element 14 in Asia Pacific.

RS also trades under the names Electrocomponents plc and Allied Electronics (the latter covering the US, Canada and Mexico). Allied announced that they are now taking preorders on 1st: http://www.electrocomponents.com/media/press-releases/2012/03/1st/

You had a tiger by the tail. The outcomes were probably binary. Too little interest for a viable platform. Or too much. Too much is better. So congratulations for finding a way to hit fast forward without the Foundation getting sucked into the vortex.

Beyond the recent whiplash the only long term concern is that high shipping fees end up killing the $25/$35 idea for home purchases for children. Obviously shipping costs will be less of an issue for schools buying in quantity.

Hope your licensees do a good job of communicating to the community and the foundation. Thanks!

Welcome back from your extended pub break. ;)

Yep, congratulations! =)

And if you really interested in criticism:
1) tried to break through to the two vendors, but could not (websites never even partially loaded)
2) The cost of delivery from Farnell to Russia amounted to € 20. When the cost of the device is € 26.73, say the least, unpleasant. Although it is expected.
Well, we can only wait and hope for improvement :)

Well I somehow managed to order the Pi from the Farnell and I got the shipping date for 26th of march. Any indications of how accuare this information is?

Lucky for me I had a free period at a little before 8 in the morning (7 GMT) at my university (I study computer engineering) and I was refreshing the farnell site like crazy. Half an hour later I have finally managed to place an order.

I am really glad that you chose farnell as a partner. I have been ordering electronic supplies from them for the past four years and they were allways great. And they have a realy fast delivery service to Slovenia which is great.

I got snookered into recording my “interest” for the product… obviously, not very well thought out or communicated.

I then tried to order one here in the states, and again, missed the boat. Allied and Newark will hopefully notify me when they’re able to manufacture enough to meet the needs.

I’ve given up. I’ll come back in June / July when this mess is sorted out and when I can order one and get one in a few days.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m VERY VERY excited about the R Pi! I know you can’t realistically forecast demand on an awesome product like this unless you have an unlimited budget. Just frustrated; that’s all.

I’m with you on this.

Like everyone else I woke up early and started F5’ing the website until I could see the notice about the decision of delegating to others the sell. That’s fine, just wished I could know that earlier.

Then the actual impossibility to buy one due to the distributors ineptitude. And thanks to that I’ll be put in queue *after* all the Brits have been served.

I think all this could have been managed better. I hope RS will contact me back, else the excitement could wear off by June…

Man! 10,000 RasPi’s gone in 60 seconds!
I was planning an entire month’s itinerary when I get my RasPi.
How did you lined up yourselves/computers to make sure you’ll be the first 10,000 to get one?

I know the order process was very difficult for a lot of people and the quite brilliant strategic decision to license manufacturing to RS and Farnell would have left some people outside the electronics/hacker community a bit confused compared to a more consumer friendly Amazon experience. I have to say ordering through the Australian Element 14 was reasonably painless considering the unprecedented demand. My order timed out a few times but I re-entered form details and continued and got free shipping and a price within my expectations. Despite the anguish at the time I have waited ten times longer to talk to someone at a call center for a worse outcome. I can’t wait for delivery and I am looking forward to being able to buy a second one.

Thanks – it’s much appreciated! (We think it’s a great decision too.)

Well, I was one of the thousands missed. *pouts*
Hopefully I will get my chance to get one, two or three, “B”‘s!

Congrats on the successful launch!

I really don’t know why everyone is so upset. Thank you guys and gals for doing your best. I got mine on order, I don’t care when it comes, I’m patient and can wait. I have to wonder with all the buzz if half the people know what they are getting into when they purchased these wonderful devices. Meaning they are sort of DIY. But I could be wrong. I’m glad to be apart of the experience. Good job, chin up and don’t stress, I can’t wait to use it in my projects. When the time comes I’ll purchase some more. Thank you again.

I placed my order around 6 hours after the realease at element14 asia, and they charged $45 for the pi and +10$ for shipping. I ordered anyway, and hoped it would get here before I move in about 2 months.. god was I wrong.. first I got a lead time of 10weeks, and then they called me(from singapore to japan ;D) on my mobile, and said they expect shipping in may or june.. :O So I had to cancel my order because I don’t know where I’m gonna live by then :S I hope things cool down and I can order a pi once things get more normal, and there’s possibility to compare the shipping prices and such.
Anyway, I guess the commercial school release will be delayed since not even all the hackery ppl will have gotten theirs by then :) And why do you think there are less hackery ppl then the amount that have orderd? There’s alot of hackery ppl all over the world.. :)

Probably should have logged in before I replied the first time (beer fail), but welcome back & I should check my email to see if I have got a reply from whoever I “expressed an interest” with.

Congrats on the launch! I managed to only pre-order (30 minutes after launch) – the final cost runs to RM145 (including shipping of RM20) from element14 in Malaysia. In USD, that’s about $48. Shipping date end of April.

Hi there, Just dropped by to leave a comment on how incredibly frustrating launch day was and how unhelpful both RS and Farnell have been. I was hitting refresh on the RPi site from 05:55 so I got to see the site almost the instant it was back up and therefore got to see RS’s website just before it expired horribly… I won’t go into the excruciating details, but I was trying to buy a Pi for over three and a half hours on both web sites and via both telephone ordering hotlines (I already had accounts with both Farnell and RS) and the conflicting information from your twitter page and the two companies was most annoying. Anyway, the reason for the comment is… Acting on the instructions of the RS online help desk, who said that if I hadn’t got an email when I registered the first time, at around 06:01, my registration may not have gone through. I re-registerd yesterday and still didn’t get an email, so I thought I may have registered twice and was a little concerned that due to the one-per-customer policy, having two registrations may cause a problem – so I contacted RS online help again to let them know and ask if it was going to be OK… and while I was explaining the problem, I was told three times “you will receive a communication in up to 7 days time regarding the lead time etc” and then the representative cut me off while I was trying to ask my question. Now I don’t know if I have a valid registration, and am very annoyed with both RS and Farnell (Whose web site is rubbing salt into the wound by saying “Following the successful launch of Raspberry Pi Board B we’ve seen unprecedented levels of interest in this product.” which was neither “successful” or “unprecedented” due to the server problems and the fact that you told them to expect the interest)

Welcome back from what has been quite a roller coaster ride I’m sure!

I hope that you’ll let other companies sell them, as well. In Canada, we’ve got RobotShop.ca, which sells mainstream stuff like Roombas, but also really geeky robotics stuff – and everything in between. They’d be a perfect reseller. They even increase the guarantee on some products like the robot vacuums. It’s nice to deal with local companies instead of somebody on another continent. And shipping is cheaper. :)

Anyway, I was one of the many people who set my alarm for early in the morning to be a part of it. I had a great time DDOSing you (sorry – we all meant well!), even though I didn’t get one of the first batch. I’m still excited to get one of the next batches.

You are not dealing with somebody on another continent. Neark is in Canada whish is local.

And obviously that is Newark…

Yeah, there is free shipping. But, handling charges are $20! What is this?

It is the only thing holding me back from buying one…

We’re looking into that.

the shipping cost will will eliminate the chance to buy in Brazil.

Is impossible to buy from a local distributor because the local shippng cost is abusive.

example of shipping absurd:
If i want to buy an Super Mini Bluetooth 2.0 Adapter Dongle from dealextreme (china), i will pay $1.8 to receive in home with free shipping.
But if i want to give this same item for free to a friend in my own city i must to pay around $7 just for shipping!!!

Thats it:
I can pay $1.8 dollar w/ shipping include for a bluetooth adaptor from china and receive it in my home, but if i want to give this to a neighbor for free i must to pay $7 dollars for shipping.

So, please, make a deal with Deal Extreme (dealextreme.com), i think its the best way for a brazilian to buy the raspberrypi

A partnership with DealExtreme would be a heck of a lot of fun, but that’s mostly just the hacker in me speaking.

I’ve had good experiences with DX in the past, but I know that a lot of my friends are wary of getting their electronic gear from what they call my “sketchy Hong Kong suppliers.” Of course, I always correct them and say that not all of the companies are from Hong Kong… ;-)

For the RPi folks, especially after the whole launch-day DDOS kerfuffle, I can understand that they would want to keep their nose really clean. Partnering with big battleships of electronic distributorship companies would hopefully give them that stability and reliability that other companies like DX or FocalPrice might not offer. Except it appears that RPi is [i]still[/i] having issues with their distributors, and as RPi themselves said: The launch day issues were nearly completely the fault of the distributor companies.

RPi could perhaps get more units to more people in a shorter period of time by also opening up distribution to companies like DX, however by expanding in this fashion I think there might be questions about whether quality or service would be kept at a high level. And I don’t think that a company like DX fits in to the current RPi business model (charity model?).

If I had to sum up RPi briefly, I’d say that it is a charity currently creating a set of hardware/software tools for UK education, and is licensing their IP to a limited number of distributors, funding their operations with the royalty proceeds.

I think that the real power of DX is that they offer decent stuff at really good prices, with bulk discounts and free shipping. You can get a lot of off-brand stuff at DX, especially in the electronics realm, and my guess is that one of their strengths is that they can keep their prices low by replacing a supplier or just discontinuing a product (similar Trader Joe’s business model).

If the RPi board schematics were available under an Open Hardware license (which I’ve heard hints of, but probably no dice on the Broadcom parts), then perhaps a company like DX could get some from one of their suppliers. Heck — if the demand were there, DX could probably even get a special “DX” version made with a DX- branded case or something. But I think that the RPi folks are looking for a slower, “vetted” process for how they distribute these things which (although it may produce a higher-quality, more bug-free product) might just be too slow and controlled of a process to successfully partner with DX.

The good news is that if the RPi sees a lot of interest, then just like the OLPC sparked the netbook form factor/price niche, I expect we’ll see places like DX or even Amazon carrying mini SOC computers in the $20-40 range soon. Shenzhen will get to work, and everyone wins!

You people are awesome!
Of course I didn’t get so lucky to get a pie from the first batch, but I admire your cool during the whole thing when you had people screaming at you because they could not buy one. But I was not screaming, I was in awe at the enthusiasm.
I’m still a little bit confused on how to actually “pre-order” the board for the US, but I think I will figure it out. In the medium to long term, I’m hoping that the board will be continuously available for everyone at any time, seeing it has so much great potential.
Bravo!

I finally got an order in at Newark… ship date May 14. I am usually horribly impatient, but the RPi is going to be worth it. I hope interest for the RPi continues and the Foundation continues to have great success.

To reduce the shipping cost it would be helpful to build a website “who is ordering in my city” so that people can organize mass orders for yourself, helping to find each other.

If someone would buy ten units or more, he/she will have to deal with a customs clearance. At least in Russia.

Personally, I want to ask RasPi Foundation to find some way for shipping directly from China. I’m pretty sure the strangely similar board called “Strawberry Kk” will be available on DX, FP and other China webstores within 2-3 months and with a free shipping option. I won’t disallow myself to buy it there, but I’ll be glad to pay a few pounds for charity directly to RasPi Foundation just after that (separately).

Congratulations to all involved on getting the project this far!

I got an order in via element14/farnell within an hour of launch. I’m not really overly fussed if I receive it in the next couple of weeks or not, or months even. What’s more important to me is that my 2 year old daughter learns to program using one of these devices or a successor when she’s at school (Daddy may help at home too). I’d love love love to see this project succeed. Congratulations again. Individuals can change the world!

Spencer.

I join the thousands who are disappointed with RS and Farnell. Everything was going GREAT until they came along!
I’m coursing and pulling out my hair of how much they suck. Never trust companies who are in it for the money. The bigger the companies the worse they are.

I CANT GET MY PRE-ORDERING OF Raspberry Pie!

GET ME THE CEO OF THESE COMPANIES. I WANT TO TEAR THEIR EARS FROM THEIR HEADS, TYSON STYLE!

Liz,

I’m Sorry!

Blood Pressure – Back to usual
Stress Level – Back to usual
Toys – Back in the pram
Dummy – Back in mouth

George

Thanks ever so much. That really means a lot.

Congrats guys! I really hope your success inspires others to do the same. This would be a great new product category that could change many children/peoples lives.

You realise of course that once you have this storm worked out you’ll start to hear the growing wail of “Model C.”

:)

could some tell the differnce between
could someone tell me the difference between
http://in.element14.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-chipset/chipset-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081347
and
http://in.element14.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-pcba/sbc-raspberry-pi-model-b/dp/2081185

Yup, 2081185 is the product you want. 2081347 is not.

Congratulations, guys !!!
What a ride! I loved the fact that your website was rock solid and two BIG commercial sites promptly melted, and not just for a couple of minutes, but for HOURS – tee hee :-)
The sheer numbers of people ordering must have done great things for your economies of scale and be making easier for you to keep hit the price point you aimed for. Kudos! I bet both Farnell & RS have stopped thinking of you as an interesting niche toy now ;-)

“The first shall be last and the last first”

Congratulations on finally getting the Pi on the streets, but I’m afraid the release process did not work at all well. Our two chief engineers were in within the first 15 seconds on the RS site butwere only able to register interest (and are still waiting for any response), while we know of others outside our company who have paid and received delivery dates for pre-orders with Farnell placed 9 hours later. :-( 8-(

Moreover, those of us here on the mailing list have never received any email from the foundation beyond the initial sign-up confirmation. :-( 8-( :-(> :-(

I got a replay email from RS in Dutch. Whist it’s good to know that they are doing something or other, writing in a language with too many repeating vowels is too hard for a mere Brit. I had hoped their computer was clever enough to know that.

Whatever it says I don’t know, and I hope I am not supposed to do anything from it.

Try this:
http://translate.google.co.uk/?hl=en&tab=wT#nl|en|

hi eben.;
how many order to model b.?

The Foundation manufactured 10k, which will be allocated between the two distributors. On Wednesday, the distributors placed manufacturing orders which together total around 100k. They’ll probably place further manufacturing orders in the coming days.

(with the possible exception of small quantities that are needed for qualification and other commitments)

Hi Liz, Eben,

Congratulations on the launch of the Pi I’m really excited to see how it develops over the next few months especially as everyone starts to show their vision for what they want the Raspberry Pi to do.

Could I just ask, what is happening regarding the 400 Qt On Pi boards? The people on the mailing list are waiting patiently and politely to find out what happens now in light of the changes that were announced on Wednesday so if you got any information that would be great, thanks :-)

Eben’s spoken to Tom Hinton, who should let you all know what’s happening.

I understand every-ones disappointment but why be so angry? Even if their servers had coped with all the traffic they were receiving you still would not have got one. There was only 10k units available and Liz and Eben have already said orders are at least 10 times greater than this.

Look on the bright side, at least when you do get one there’ll be more software available for them and maybe even some documentation.

Very well done to the foundation for what I think was a very successful launch. I don’t think anyone could have predicted this level of interest in what is essentialy a development board.

+1

Some (angry) people need to more realistic.

+1, +1

First of all let me just congratulate your big launch :)

But I am a bit sad now after reading trough all of the comments, I logged on at exactly 6:00GMT on launch day , tried to purchase from RS and Farnell but like most could not access there sites, I then started following the tweets and F5’ing the two sites to try and get one.

Twice on RS did I actually receive the “Expression of interest” page, but one of the tweets you put out on twitter, stated that if I got that page it is incorrect, so I never filled it out , until a lot later when you tweeted that “Expression of interest” would be turned into “Pre-orders” in one of the articles, so I was pretty much at the back of the que by then, and I completed one on both the .co.za (South Africa) and .co.uk (UK) RS sites.

Now I am also reading that a lot of the “Expression of interest” filled out wasnt captured and a lot of people haven’t gotten a email from RS :(

As for shipping price, I dont think that you could have chosen a more convenient distribute than RS, there literally 20mins away from my house (Centurion South Africa) , and I can arrange local pickup from them so I will only be paying R251 ($33.5) if the indicated price can be trusted.

So to sum it up, Congratulations on the huge demand, and picking a very convenient distributor in South Africa, but I fear that my pre-order never came trough and I am now in the back of the que till 2013-2014 :(

Congratulations with so highly demanded launch!
But users from Russia, Ukraine were highly disappointed by the prices for delivery of Farnell to these regions, it costs 20 euros(!) for 35$ device. ( I know they use the most secure way, but…)
We were hoping for delivering by Royal Mail, as was mentioned at the beginning, it should be times less.
Are you planning to switch to ordinary mail delivery some day (I hope for it!)?
Or we have to pay those moneymakers(maybe deliverers) almost the price of the RasPi.

There are a few bugs in the Farnell ordering system which Liz and the team are working hard with Farnell to iron out – thanks for letting us know about Russia and Ukraine.

Farnell informed me that total cost incl. shipping (to Poland) will be almost 36GBP (~55USD). Looks like a lot of additional costs.

Check again with them – or wait until the Foundation sorts out the pricing issue next week – we are looking in to it.

Welcome back Eben & Liz, we missed you ! Big congratulations on the huge demand for the Raspberry Pi. Hopefully the extra sales, lessons learned etc can translate into accelerating the Foundations’s plans and goals, and a very successful educational launch later this year. I also hope that you have big smiles on your faces from the positive comments here, and have started to catch up on your sleep ! Thank you for putting so much work into this.

I am in South Africa, and I’m still unsure who to order through, I did fill in the express interest form at RS Components, and I have received my confirmation email from RS Component. Farnell does seem to have a South African representative called Electrocomp http://www.electrocomp.co.za/ should I contact them?

I really want this project to succeed. I know *at least* six oher people in Cape Town, and one has told his whole class of Electrical Engineering students about Raspberry PI. There will be significant demand here.

I am also from South Africa, I tried filling out a expression of interest form on both the uk and South African RS sites (rs.co.za) , but there hasnt been a reply, one of the other comments said that they didnt capture all the “Expression of interest” filled out , so I am at a loss :(

Looks like their sister site http://eexpress.co.za is the one you want, they have the Raspberry Pi listed, though bizarrely it’s shown as “discontinued”. At least that give you somewhere you can phone and ask.

Hi i did a search for you (za is South Africa)

Register you interests here
http://za.rs-online.com/web/generalDisplay.html?id=raspberrypi
That will put you in the end of a (large) queue of pre-orders, please read the FAQ:
Also read my post about RS Component tweets (contains a link to a RPi FAQ).

No I am not an employee from RS Components – I am just happy to help people.

I’ve already registered, and got in queue, and have got my confirmation email. Not sure I was on the South African site, but the page looks exactly the same.

Congrats on launch and going back to non-static. But I have a question: When will I be able to ORDER a RPi? I’m from Belgium and it seems to me that premier farnell and RS components don’t take any orders from here (and the Netherlands as well I’ve been told). The only thing I can do is “express an interest in RPi”. Am I missing something or is this normal?

I’m pretty frustrated at not being able to get hold of one of the first 10k ft raspberry. I waited 20 Minune and I never managed to achieve one of two websites. But that’s okay, ca just want to say that many people are interested and that’s a good sign. Again, congratulations, good luck and good luck for the future! This adventure is really exciting!

Congrats to you. But the scalpers are already at work: the Newark US branch tacks on a $20 “handling fee” on every pre-order! Thanks to channel partners like these, your $35 computer is now a $55 computer, and the fat cats will keep the better share of the Pi.

Its been covered several times already in the comments – the handling fee is an error which is in the process of being fixed.

First of all; congrats with your release of the Pi!

Secondly, I cant resist writing down my enormous frustration I’m dealing with. Frustration about the fact that on the launch it suddenly appaered that a) the sites of the two companies broke, b) when I finally manged to get to the order stage it appeared I had to open an account (which could not be doen since I got several time-outs) c) I noticed that the price was more than promised, it was also topped with VAT and had high shipping costs so the price was almost doubled….
I didn’t get the chance to order due to time-puts and sites being down. I spent the whole Wednesday morning from 07:00 (GMT + 1) and ended empty handed.
I showed my interest on the two sites but haven’t heard from them since…..

Disappointed rules at this moment…..

One day I will get mine surely but man, I feel terrible right now….

Hi all,

Thanks for all the effort so far. The partner move was fantastic.

I do need some help though, I can’t work out if I’m on the list or not?

The same as half the world, I set my alarm and sat patiently for the announcement, then as soon as it popped up, read it and clicked on the RS site (6:03 ish) and entered an interest. A confirmation page did come back, but I’ve not heard anything since.

Helppppppp!!!! :)

Ras Pi folks. My understanding is that one per customer was to be applied to the first batch of 10000. Now you have Farnell and RS on board surely that should not apply to later production runs. I ask because I’ve been given a delivery estimate of 38 days. Now that is surely not being supplied from the first batch. My order for 2 units has been reduced to 1. My concern here is that the word has been distributed around the corporate organisations of only one per customer FOREVER. Could you confirm that after the first 10000 units have been sold that we may order whatever quantities we want AND let your distributors know.

They know.

Liz, Did you just confirm that the distributors have been told that from this date forward orders should be accepted for multiple units???

Given that the first 10,000 are spoken for that’s what you seem to be saying. If so, when will this new policy be posted on the raspberrypi site and on the distributor’s sites?

The one unit per customer rule will be lifted once the initial demand has subsisted.

subsided?

Could you please define initial demand. I’m not trying to be awkward I have been a production manage for a contract electronics manufacturer and the key thing you need to know is how many. If you are intending to meet the demand then the manufacturer needs to know numbers and we need to be allowed to order the quantities we want. If on the other hand the plan is to churn out x number of boards each period irrespective of the demand and distribute them on a first come first served basis then it is going to take a bloody long time to satisfy the initial demand. It is possible to accept an order for several items, deliver 1 and back order the rest which would satisfy your rule and reveal the true level of demand.

Manufacture, which will now be done by RS/Farnell should be done on demand (not similar batch sizes as the foundation would have needed to do through cash flow reasons). Plus presumably, a bit extra. It’s their call, but they want to sell as many as they can!

Hi Guys, Just wanted to add to the congratulations. It is disappointing that people are being so hot headed about the launch. I am sure that many people (me included) were sitting at their computers and thinking other ways that the launch could have run, but none of us are on the coal face.

Has anyone actually had a reply from RS and/or Farnell? I registered on both sites within 15 minutes of the kick off time. The email addresses I used are the emails attached to my RS (i have been a RS account holder for 30 years and used my current email for 10) and Farnell (I have been a farnell account holder for 25+ years) since then nothing, yesterday I registered on a private email address again nothing?

I have received one email from Farnell overnight but it was conformation shipment of an order i placed on monday for someting on back order and nothing to do with the pi?

Yes I understand it was 10 times over subscribed but I am wondering why nothing has been received.

Try doing a search on Farnell UK’s main page for “2081185”. That’s their product code for a Raspi Model B. It should let you order one from there (though obviously it will go straight onto back order).

I ordered from them and I’ve had emails to confirm my order and give me shipping estimates (23rd April).

That code redirects immediately to the register interest page – you may have been able to pre order from farnell at one point but they’ve had that hardcoded redirect in since Wednesday afternoon on the uk site – prior to that I was unable to get on it so can’t tell what they were doing.

I registered interest on the rs site at 6.05am but nothing yet. Probably should register interest on farnell too but they’re charging more so would prefer rs.

(Grr… stupid ‘spamfree’ is so broken.. always have to give up and log in to the forum)

Hmm, it was working at the time I tried that ! I wonder if someone at Farnell saw my comment and has “fixed” it ?!

I meant to say it was working when I *typed* that, i.e. a bit earlier this morning !

ok, try going straight to http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?SKU=2081185 , that’s working for me.

http://www.electrocomponents.com/media/press-releases/2012/02/29th/

this is the mail I got from RS March 1st:

Dear Customer

Thank you for joining the Raspberry Pi revolution and registering your interest in Raspberry Pi’s Model B board from RS Components.

We have received extraordinary levels of demand for this product. To help ensure as many people as possible can experience the Raspberry Pi concept, we are limiting boards to one per customer, and we will send you further information on your request in the next seven days. Once we receive the boards into stock, they will be allocated on a first-come first-serve basis, in order of when requests were received.

Thank you for your patience; we will be in touch as soon as possible with more details.

Sadly, Farnell’s postage cost (the local Farnell site from my country) is almost double of what I’d have to pay if you were sending the package with the Royal mail.

Edit: I was also dissapointed that you didn’t announce anywhere prior the launch that we couldn’t use paypal for payment. This inconvenience set me back for several hours until I could get home and probably put me back a couple of months on the waiting list.

Liz and the team are looking into this country by country for both distributors. please could you let us know which country you are in and how much you are currently being quoted for shipping.

Slovenia, 5€.

For Spain the total cost from farnell is 42€ ($55), including taxes and shipping.

[…] einem Blogpost fasst Eben noch einmal alle neuen Informationen […]

Very nice!

Uhh, this was supposed to be a reply to another post. Please delete.

Hi there!
I unfortunatly overslept on launch day :-) and finally managed to log in at 11:30 GMT. After a few F5s i got through at Farnells and could place my order. The description said “delivery in 30 days”. Three hours later i got a phonecall from Farnell/Germany, who asked for my VAT number and told me, delivery would be in 7-10 days! Well, that would be great but 30 day would also be fine for me.
You´re doing a great job at RP.org! Don´t bother with all those trolls our there, i guess the majority knows, that what are doing is hard work and respects you for for what you are doing!
Mathias

Can we please have a comment on the delivery times?
The static page told us “unlimited orders in a month or so”…
But now Farnell is mailing out things like week 16-18, for the single, _first_ unit to arrive..
Is this just their best guess at the moment? Can they ramp up the production? Or are we really looking at this long delivery times?

I have bad knowledge about HW-production, but information is key, and it would just be nice to get the process explained, because I don’t get how it can take up to 9 weeks until batch #2 (called farnell and I’m in their next “batch”.. and still it says week 18..)
It was my understanding that the “process” already had been “figured out” since batch #1 already is produced…, and that it was just a matter of deciding how much to produce, not to get the whole production “thingy” in place….

Thanks for a great product, I’m not angry/hater/whatever, just a bit dissapointed, it would just be nice to get some more detailed information.
Guess it’s good that you could hook RS & Farnell, because in a ~10k/batch, we would have had our units by 2014 :P

Btw: Why the ¤/(¤”/ does the comment system fail on “press back and type the password” about 10 times before it accepts the post? :P
Chrome/IE/FF no diffrence..

Liz and Eben will be making a blog post about this in the next few days. Right now, the team are working furiously to ensure that both distributors have all the parts and information they need to manufacture successfully. As you can probably imagine, the logistics are not unlike a small millitary operation.

I was at 6am, and ups DDOS.
later registered interest in both sites, and send email to farrel. They replied requesting info, after my reply, responded with the contacts of the Portugal’s representation. Called them, and they didn’t know what raspberry was but strangely many people where calling them LOL. Send them my info again, and after this first day never earth from them again, don’t have any feedback. I’m following this up in a month or so.

“This will save you money on shipping”

Or not, I’m in France and at Farnell I had to pay a 12€ shipping cost.

And also, for the same location (France), at Farnell some people paid the RasPi 21,9€ and some other 33€. There are some problems in sell who have to be fixed.

I have a small sentiment that the first customers have been scammed (not the fault of the RasPi team at all, you made a very good joob!)

I really want to get a Raspberry Pi but neither RS nor Farnell will let me pay with PayPal, and that’s the only payment method I can use…

Unfortunately the Foundation doesn’t have a solution for you right now – it was one of the compromises that were made when switching distribution models. Liz is aware that there are a small yet significant number of people who either need to, or would prefer to, pay by Paypal. Hopefully its something the Foundation will be able to offer later in the year.

Why didn’t you warn us about this prior to the launch?

I have managed a lifetime of paying for goods and services and never used Paypal once. I don’t know any “real” businesses that take Paypal. My electricity provider doesn’t. My home loan doesn’t. My Internet provider doesn’t. My supermarket doesn’t.

All your domestic payments you can make with domestic payment methods (e.g. in the Netherlands everything is done with a debit-card), but online other rules apply. Almost always you need a creditcard. What if you are too young for a creditcard or think the costs for a creditcard are too high for that one online non-domestic payment per year? I believe the target audience was initially expressed as youngsters (would they have a creditcard?).

Congratulations on your launch, really well done. My experience was pretty good all things considered. I didn’t bother getting up early, I saw the announcement around 7am (GMT) and had a quick try getting on RS and Farnells to no avail, but managed to register interest with RS. Later that morning at work, I tried from time to time and got a little further and then at 11:46 I managed to place an order with Farnells to my amazement. I got confirmation emails of my order and an estimated delivery date of w/c 16 April. My Raspi has cost me £31.86 including VAT, but with free shipping which was a nice surprise. Yes quite a long lead time but I’m just grateful at having got my order in and being in the queue.

RS : doesn’t sell to individuals in France
Farnell : ask $18.85 incl VAT for postage (!!!) on top of the $35 RPi (that’s $41.86 incl VAT) that they sell for $52+ incl VAT.
BTW Farnell also doesn’t sell to individuals in some countries.

I can’t believe the foundation sells the RPi to Farnell & RS for the RRP $35 but I’d love to be proved wrong as this would mean more benefit for the foundation. Yet these companies add a further margin on top of the RRP (other than the local taxes)

As a regular buyer from UK and German retailers, I never paid such a ridiculous price for shipping. It usually goes for $3 to $4.5 shipping cost to France. Last Thursday, not 10 years ago, I received a 5 port HDMI switch with remote ctrl and power supply (can’t be smaller and ligther than a RPi, can it ?) for $2.86 from German sotel.de retailer, hand delivered by a smiling Fedex employee.

Between $18.85 and $2.86, can anyone spot the intruder ?

Just got my third $39.60 (VAT incl.) hard-to-find-now brand new cased Seagate Dockstar. By the time I’m finished putting it to good use the RPi might be distributed at other decent outlets.

I’d rather not have a RPi than buy one from RS ot Farnell given their current pricing policies.

I don’t blame the RPi people except maybe for trusting world wide businesses would have world wide policies.

PS : all currency conversions were done on http://www.xe.com

Thanks for the information about France. The Foundation are working closely with both distribution companies to ensure that their systems are tweaked so that Raspberry Pi sales to individuals and inexpensive shipping options are available in every territory.

Please don’t let the negative people get you (the Foundation) down. From 6:00am I F5-ed my keyboard to death and didn’t get one. All that says to me is that this is going to be even more of a success than I had ever imagined.

The (silent) majority of people are more than happy to wait a bit longer, as the wait will be worthwhile.

We still love you.

Just preordered from Farnell, which did momentarily crash just after I got the email, then nearly ordered £50 worth of stuff I left in my basket 3 years ago but apart from that all is good.

This info may have a lot of people’s interest who had registered an interest for a Pi by RS Comonents.
On Twitter RS components ( http://twitter.com/#!/RSElectronics ) had poststed these tweets:

If you want updates on your registration of interest for @Raspberry_Pi keep an eye on our FAQ page http://ow.ly/9pDJM ^JS
—
unfortunately we are not able to scope the outcome on an individual basis, the FAQs have official timings for responsens ^JS
—
we’ll be regularly communicating with everyone who has registered to keep them up with the latest updates ^JS
—
To alleviate the wait for your @Raspberry_Pi check out @DesignSparkRS dedicated resource centre
(My note: @DesignSpark is
http://twitter.com/#!/DesignSparkRS , http://designspark.com/ )
—

In my opinion going with RS and Farnell was a big, as in BIG, mistake. They are well known to only sell to businesses in a good number of countries. I live in such a country. I had the displeasure to deal with both companies in the past, experiencing their arrogant and unfriendly behavior when I tried to order from them. Both don’t even let you open an account online, and you need an account to place an order online.

Many people in the past have asked them to rethink that behavior. All they got as response was ridicule and lame excuses. I would not trust them if their UK branches tell you they’ll fix it. The decision to sell to businesses only is made by the local branches on their own.

You are assuming that the Foundation didn’t consider this possibility when they signed up their distributors, and didn’t place contractual obligations on the distributors.

Interesting, I had a much different experience with Farnell. I have been their customer for about four years now and never had any problems with them. When I first registered there I also thought that you need to be a company (it requires you to fill in the company name) but the system also lets you choose that you are an individual. A day alter a woman from there called me to confirm that I am an individual and explained some things about bulk orders and to let me know that their system charges too much for postage so the final price is a few pounds lower.

And they have realy good delivery service. If you need electronic components fast and qute cheap – farnell is the way to go.You pay around 5€ for the postage and you get it delivered next day. This is better than if I order from a local company.

You just forgot to say in which country you get such a 5€ deal on shipping from Farnell.

Woops. I thought that I did. The country is Slovenia. Most of the time the price you pay around here for the dlivery is around 5€ – for local delivery. And Slovenia is really small country. And you usually pay the same price for slow delivery. Farnell on the other hand at least has a realy fast delivery.

I’m from Slovenia too and I don’t think 5€ is a cheap postage cost for such a small device. But reading the other posts we still have it cheaper than many.

First of all my congrats to your launch and for the incredibly success up to now.

But now I have to say something about the distributors. It’s a pity… I’m ordering from germany and it seems you have to do lots of magic here to even place an order.

I managed to reach both sites a few minutes after 0600GMT. On the german Farnell shop I wasn’t able to put one in the basket as the shop said the price couldn’t be calculated (what the hell…). On RS I was able to complete the form but haven’t received any email yet. But never mind this…

Finally I managed to place an order at Farnell Germany at 0840GMT (at nearly 42 EUR but even better as nothing…). I immediately got an email announcing that my order has received. But now, a few days later, I haven’t heard *anything* from them. And therefore I haven’t got any estimated shipping date yet.

In the meantime there are a lot of reports by people here in Germany that Farnell is randomly cancelling their orders as you can only order if you’re having a company and sending them documents which this clarifies. I even wrote an email to Farnell about that case on Thursday but haven’t got any reply so far.

The next pity is that I noticed that there are many people who already got their estimated shipping date from Farnell in other countries. Yeah great, I didn’t… So is it really the case that they are serving the orders on a first come first serve order? I don’t think so. I’m really strained what estimated delivery date I’ll get (if they even accept my order and don’t cancel it) as I’m waiting for 3 days now – maybe November 2012 or so? I mean, if they were processing the orders according to their order numbers I should have received an email with an estimated shipping date. But here at Farnell Germany it seems that they are glad if they can cancel orders…

So I’m really excited if Farnell will ever get me an email and what’s the content (cancelation or shipping date). Hopefully people in other countries don’t have that much trouble with the distributors!

I ordered from the German farnell page as well at something around 09.30GMT.

I also have received an order confirmation but no shipping date yet. I sent them a verification saying that I’m a student, which let’s you order from then (and actually gets you a 12% discount if you can believe what’s written in the FAQ).
Just wanted to tell you you’re not the only one ;)
Let’s wait and see.

Any news on your order?

I still haven’t received an estimated shipping date from them yet. wrote two emails in the meantime, which are unanswered up to now.

Greetings from Hungary!
It is a huge success that everyone want to get a Pi :)
My unit will arrive in the middle of april. The final price is 55USD / 35GBP / 12000HUF [ including shipping and 27% VAT ] from hu.farnell.com.
Please don’t forget to design and distribute a case for the Pi. I saw the communiti already designed some nice enclosure for it :) It would be nice to have a casing when the board arrives.

Thanks for all your really hard work. Will RS / Farnell boards include GPIO connections in place – the picture on Farnell’s site shows GPIO pins but I’m guessing that that’s one of your prototypes. It would make sense, since they’ll be making the boards for education. I’ll pop out and get an 8gb card and a spare keyboard and mouse while I wait for my Pi :)

The GPIO will be just holes.

You’re correct in thinking the picture is of one of the beta boards :)

Congratulations on getting the Pi launched! Here’s hoping it will be wildly successful in every way!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my experience though… I immediately went on the attack at six o’clock sharp when the launch took place, and for the next hour and a bit I was completely unable to reach a working webpage on the website of either distributor. Later RS responded but only displayed a page for “registering interest” but I did not realize that that’s what I should have done, then and there, instead still holding on to the misplaced hope of actually finding a page for actually ordering one.

Much, much later in the day the unnecessarily heavy website of Farnell started responding too with a registration form, but by that time all hope of actually getting a Pi for myself any time soon had vanished. Even supposing I could have reached a working ordering page, the process would surely have been terminated by the requirement of creating an account with either distributor – an impossibility when under an unprecedented load of visitors.

I guess I’ll be looking forward to a Christmas Pi, if all goes as perfectly as they can from now on. How long are the lead times for the next few batches anyway? I have not heard from anyone who has gotten one, or heard from the distributors either in any manner.

Oh, and this “Spam Free WordPress” with its “zero false positives” thing is a joke, right? It does NOT work. It just goes “Error 1: Click back and type in the password.” all the time, on every browser.

The last rumour was a 4-6 week turnaround for batch 2.

Given that this is the first batch produced with element14/Farnell licensing the design, there will probably be some teething troubles and slight issues to work out.

The good news is that it’ll be a *much* larger batch, and batches 3-x will probably be smoother and predictable.

The best advice is keep an eye out for news from RS/element14 as they’re keen on keeping pre-order customers in the loop over the next few weeks.

I was bitterly disappointed, it has to be said, but any comments about the ridiculousness of the situation were about the situation and company, not any particular individual. If I shout at a sales assistant in a shop because of a stupid shop policy, it’s nothing personal – they are just the representative and the only tangible thing I *can* complain to at that moment.

I’ve followed a couple of interesting projects long-term (e.g. OpenPandora, etc.) and it was so humiliating to think that RaspPi was actually following in their “didn’t-think-it-through” shoes.

I don’t do pre-orders. All through the project it was said “No pre-orders.” No pre-orders. No pre-orders. No pre-orders. You can only pre-order, and not even from us. You could have set that list up MONTHS ago and not take down two major suppliers and make everyone fight, just handed off the details to them.

We’re ready. We’re ready. We’re ready. Oops, the people we got to do the launch had no idea what was happening (though, admittedly, taking down Farnell was quite impressive because you even took down their subsidiaries like CPC) and we have no way to fix it or find out what’s happening until their technicians wake up this morning.

Limited run for developers. Limited run for developers. Limited run for developers. BBC News, BBC Breakfast, China state TV, “We are launching and you can order now” (though the paraphrasing isn’t directly your fault – “your” meaning RaspPi’s).

What I feel most bitter about was that the initial units were supposed to be for developers so you had some software at the real “launch” (see – that’s the problem – you haven’t really “launched” yet because a member of the public can’t just go to a supplier and buy stock today). What’s happened now is that you’ll have 10,000 sales, only some of which will be developers, so even the next 100,000 won’t have wodges of software to use on them.

They were supposed to be targeting education, how many people who have them will be writing *educational* software or seeing how they work in an educational context? Few, I think. It’s mainly gadget-geeks and maybe some friends who were dragged into it by the gadget-geeks so they could get more units.

I think the launch was a bit of a farce, it has to be said, and springing new suppliers, pre-order mechanics that could have been set up at any time (and that’s not a mistake you can “fix” now, because it’s too late for the next time when people now have thousands of extra pre-orders in Farnell/RS’s systems), and TV coverage on the same day as what was supposed to be a limited launch for developers to get their hands on an early development kit – well, that’s a bit hurtful to the people who had an interest in the project, and making it practical for education, and not just the gadget itself.

I think there’s an awful lot of stuff that could have been handled an awful lot better, with much less nasty surprises, a lot more clarity, a lot more practical sense, and a lot more decorum (RaspPi chasing suppliers on the phone to find out what’s happening isn’t exactly the most professional of launches). But the problem is – you only get the one impression for launches like that. You’ve now got thousands of people wanting a device that doesn’t physically exists and they can’t have, maybe for months. You can’t get that again. You can’t “launch” again, even if you try to fix all the problems with the initial launch.

I *think* I have an order in with RS. I got in pretty quickly (after getting up early) and have received a “thank you for expressing interest, you’ll hear back from us soon” email. The problem is, if I haven’t, then I have little interest in fighting to get one in the future until they are literally available on 24-hour guaranteed delivery. I manage IT in schools and am an Open-Source programmer. I don’t claim to be the next Eben or Linus, but I feel it’s an opportunity missed if I can’t get developing on one of these. The biggest obstacle I saw was a poorly managed (but popular – they are two different things) launch which put everything I hate about tech launches into one event.

And yet, here we are.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Initial batch wasn’t specifically developers – its always been available to all, although the foundation *expected* demand to mostly be from developers. Suppliers were only firmed up very late in the day, so wasn’t really time to announce it (and there were contractual issues as well I believe – could be wrong). Device does physically exist btw – at least he first 10k do. There was no chance of making more for the launch and with the new disties on line, larger quantities can be made more quickly.

Such a shame the foundation couldn’t have seen into the future because then they wouldn’t have to read such unreasonable responses from such unreasonable people. Sir you are a tool!

It’s ******* joke. I’m waiting for this **** since may and now I must wait next couple of month because I couldn’t buy it now!

Liz: edited for language

We’re very sorry, but there were tens and tens of thousands of people just as interested as you; and please don’t swear. There are kids here.

@Haxy: I’ve been following this project since before May, and now I must wait exactly as long as you… trying to be constructive here, would you be happier now had you known in advance through an online poll that ten or more people wanted to buy each first batch board that was available?

“would you be happier now had you known in advance through an online poll that ten or more people wanted to buy each first batch board that was available?”

I would definitely be. The Foundation managed to make such a wonderful device that everybody and their mother wants several. The only mistake they did was IMO not informing everybody that they WILL have problems with meeting demand and won’t be able to provide one for everybody at start. Instead they just fueled the fire with announcements like “set your alarms at …”. They inspired hope, but didn’t deliver. Of course there are some disappointed people now. It IS they fault, they could do better.

But don’t be too harsh on them, demand for RPi was too big to handle even for farnell and rs, so what would you expect from some charity? In my opinion what they did was just amazing. RPi is such an amazing product that IT BROUGHT TWO VERY BIG COMPANIES OFFLINE FOR HALF A DAY!

Nice to see the site back. Congrats on surviving the launch. It was frenetic, but I’ve got an acknowledgment from RS so now waiting for a chance to order from them.Hope you enjoyed your pub evening on Wed night.

A shame that Farnell are converting the $ price to Â£ at an exchange rate 11 to 12 % worse than the real rate. I see RS are not doing this – but they do not yet have it for pre-order. Of course I realised the $35 price was ex-VAT and ex-post and packing buy having an extra 11 or 12 % added on the the exchange rate does rather defeat the $35 price point if only by 3 or 4 dollars.

Sorry but you are wrong. Johnny Ball says “Let’s do the Maths” for Farnell’s price…

$35 ~= £22.50 ($1.6 £1)
+ ~£2.05 shipping (in UK)
+ VAT at 20% = £4.91 (TWENTY PERCENT!!!)
= £29.46 which is what Farnell are charging UK customers.

The FARNELL unit price INCLUDES the delivery but not the VAT.

The RS unit price of £21.60 includes neither, so including those gives £31.86 from them.

On a Linux PC this “leave a reply” panel does not work for Firefox or Opera browser, in each case it says “Error 1: Click back and type in the password.” even with the correct password. I had to use IE and Windows for it to work.

On OS X Firefox gets frequent errors, but Safari usually works on the first try.

Yes this comments system is terrible, a old good 2+2 or captcha will do the job.

I had problems in FF under linux too. Writing your comment in external editor, then refreshing page and commenting as fast as you can after refreshing seems to work. Maybe it’s some timeout issue?

Also you need to refresh page after every comment, commenting two times in a row won’t work.

In 20 years time we and our kids will be remembering this week fondly, regardless of the frustrating few hours of Wednesday morning.

I’m excited to have one on order and am glad I was part of the ‘hitting f5 on 2 broken websites at 6am’ experience. Even with a few day’s perspective, I find it quite amusing to picture thousands of bleary-eyed geeks worldwide, grimacing, chuntering, and tutting over screens, and yet still persevering.

Well done to all at the foundation for all your hard work. A sincere thank you.

Quote: “In 20 years time we and our kids will be remembering this week fondly, regardless of the frustrating few hours of Wednesday morning.”

Heh… you’ve made me think about computing “back in the day”, and it occurs to me it might’ve been more amusing if those DDoS’d websites had – after a five minute delay – said “Tape Loading Error” rather than just fail.

But maybe that’s just my warped sense of humour! :D

Firstly well done on getting them launched before the end of the month, I was one of the lucky ones that got my order in early and am expecting delivery 12th March.

My joy however was tainted by the fact that you just disappeared at 6pm and left all your loyal followers without a single message/tweet for 2 days at the time when the whole world was hungry for Pi information seems strange to say the least and very unproffessional for a organisation that has prided itself on its openess.

Another thing I would like to clear up is the Farnell Free postage myth, they are selling the board at a higher price than RS apparently because it includes postage so they saying postage is free is a bit of a con.

Now I have got that off my chest nice to see you back and I look forward to contributing my experiences when I get my bit of Pi.

The absence of tweeting/updates might be something to do with the less restrained venting of some of the “loyal” followers at the RPi team when they didn’t get an order through quick enough.

Even though I was at work (in .au, so it was 5pm) on a 1Gbit/sec university feed, that still didn’t get me a first run board, so well done for a 12th of March delivery date… have fun!

Quite. We made a decision to let people calm down for 24 hours – I am a volunteer for this charity, and after dealing with one day of it, I chose not to continue to volunteer to be subjected to some of the most sexist and racist language I’ve *ever* encountered for a couple of days. As predicted, most people seem to have calmed down now. I have to say that my sense of sisterhood with the common man has taken a bit of a beating as a result.

Hi Liz,
This makes me very sad. There is never any excuse for either sexist or racist comments. I am hopeful that these encounters represent a very small minority! I am sorry that you have been treated so badly!

You have the right to not contribute and should not be subject to any sort of abuse paid or unpaid.

The point I was making was an update to the home page saying we will be back in a couple of days or the FAQ page being available once the madness of the first few hours would have been nice rather than
leaving everyone guessing. I have been a long time follower but I am sure many read about it on the day and came looking for more info and were left with a launch page for 3 days.

I hope you are treated better Liz, personally prior to the launch the thing that drew me to wanting to be part of this community was your constant presence answering questions straight from the horses mouth as it were.

Anyway normal service resumed and I hope faith in your fellow brother/sister is restored.

Glad to hear of tens of thou of orders, great BBC and other coverage, I’m so excited about this project, as an ex-programmer (now more proj manager and always Windows stuff) – finally something to give me a reason to learn Linux and friends.

I was there at 6am to about 7:45am hitting refresh on RS, Farnell and the Twitter feed, at some point I managed to register interest on RS but gave up on Farnell untill later in the morning, around 10ish I think. RS have not responded to the registration, but Farnell responded 8pm Thursday night. I didn’t spot until 11am Friday, then I could order and did so – I’ve got an est. delivery date 30/4. Two months, not bad I guess, I can wait…

Wonderful to see the project hit this key milestone. I would like to extend my thanks to Eben, Liz and all the many other unsung heroes that have devoted their time (and money) to this cause. Your composure has been amazing when considering the many rude and inconsiderate comments that have come your way.

It’s a shame the launch did not go exactly as planned, but the publicity it created was priceless. Personally I’m a bit frustrated to hear people have got order confirmations after registering hours after I did and yet nothing has come my way from either company. (Yes I know, this is the internet and you can’t believe everything you read!)

Out of interest, how did you manage to enforce the “one Pi per person” rule when you have got two completely different companies fulfilling orders?

Thanks again, and keep up the good work!

I was there at 0600 on the 29th, managed to get on to the RS site, and register my interest in a board before the crash. However when I checked the site on Saturday it said that everyone who had registered successfully would receive an email by end of Friday. But none received so far, and no mention of my interest having been recorded in my RS account.
Looks like I have lost out in the RS crash and I am now at the back of the queue. Back to the Arduino projects for the next few months.

My confirmation arrived in Spanish from RS very late on friday, and I’ve heard of at least one arrived in German at random. Check your spam folder for any messages purporting to be from RS in another language. If that has happened, mail RS support with your details and let them know the language/country you’d prefer and that’d you’d like to keep your spot in the queue.

There will be no indication on your account that you registered your interest.

Managed to get in and register interest on the RS site pretty quickly – got an email on Thursday confirming my registration and saying I should here something within 7 days but no idea how far up the list I got. Farnell just seemed to go down instantly, I’m surprised anyone managed to order from them.

The most annoying thing I found was my plan was, while waiting to get into the RPi sales site, I would surf the Farnell site and work out what components I needed to customize my Pi. The sites being the same thing foiled that plan :(

We where discussing the events in the pub Wednesday evening. We came quickly to the a conclusion that there are only very few companies who’s website could have dealt with that number of requests. Thank you all for your interest.

Surely amazon would have coped. Also free postage! Why wasn’t that a possibility?

Dealing with just the web site is doable; RaspberryPi.org’s static page didn’t take a lot of hardware resources (just some bandwidth), interactive websites with a scalable backend on some cloud platform would have been fine as well, and I think many entities could have handled payments on top of that. But I think Amazon is the only one that could have dealt with fulfillment without having to spread it out over more than a week or so.

(I’m afraid the free postage is a myth, however. Amazon takes that out of their suppliers margins; a monopsony position and the occasional takedown help when negociating)

[dammit “spam free wordpress”, it took ten tries and three browsers, why do you hate me?]

Hate to burst your bubble but the sites were down and practically unreachable….

But there are a lot of companies who could make the good offer for the Raspberry Pi. RS and Farnell doesn’t seem very professional on this case (Wrong offer, wrong prices, huge shipping cost, etc).
Currently I’m not sure if I my pre order at Farnell is correct, there were two reference at two different prices. My command seems to be accepted but I have received no mail for a shipping date estimation.

Hello, just 1 remark farnell germany wants 27€ + 6€ vat and 7,9€ shipping wichwould be about 41€ wich at the moment would be around 55$ with shipping and 44$ without shipping included just wanted to let you know this much as for the distribution in germany.

Congratulations!!! I can’t wait for my RasPi

BTW, I ordered it from Farnell (Newark) in Mexico for USD$50.75 + USD$8.12 TAX = USD$58.87 It is not in the catalog but if yo just need to order part number 83T1943. Thanks to @WW2DX for twittering the part number!

I bought my Raspberry Pi on Farnell (es.farnell.com). In the joy of “oh my god there are still some availabale” I put a 4 on quantity. They wrote me about I can only have one, etc… and that my Raspberry will be sent about end of April !!!

Do this mean they just queued me to the next batch? I’m waiting their answer on this.

Thanks.

If those who ordered at 6:05 are expecting 8 weeks for develivery, I dread to think how long those of us who didn’t make it onto the first batch will be :-(

Any chance of them upping production rates to cope with demand, and making all of the up-at-6am early adopters happy by the end of the month? >_>

I think if you order right now then you’ll still be looking at that 8 weeks or so, so all is not lost ! The lucky few (not me) are looking at a lot less than that. Personally, I’m hoping it’s a pessimistic estimate, and they ramp up more quickly (I’m an eternal optimist !).

Congratulations, guys – must be surreal to know that with a small band of dedicated folks working on your own time you’ve managed to essentially recreate one of the great Silicon Fen launches of the 80’s – in one day you’ll have taken more orders than Chris Curry’s MK14 for Clive Sinclair’s Science of Cambridge ever sold, and you’re on track to easily outsell Sinclair Research’s ZX80 and Acorn’s Atom, even recreating en route some of the heartstopping rollercoaster thrills of the Sinclair QL “launch”, albeit considerably more ethically – and this is before you even launch properly to your intended target market. Imagine how much more desirable it will seem when it relaunches with a nice attractive plastic case and properly polished software with all the right hardware acceleration libraries joined up and a full suite of goodies like XBMC, MAME, Quake 3 etc preinstalled alongside development & education tools. Yes it’s been shocking how much the internet age has brought expectations of instant gratification to a world who seemingly can’t distinguish you from Apple or Amazon and feel their sense of indignant self-entitlement has been mortally offended, but I for one am counting this as an incredible success, and only the beginning of the real story and end of the six-year preamble – well done!

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Yeah! Got an email from RS yesterday saying that they will give me more information about my request during the next seven days :)

Whole Mail (in German as I´m from Germany ;)):
“Sehr geehrter Kunde,

vielen Dank für Ihre Beteiligung an der Raspberry Pi „Revolution“ und Ihre Registrierung für ein Raspberry Pi Modell B.

Wir haben eine ausgesprochen große Nachfrage für dieses Produkt. Um einem möglichst großen Interessentenkreis den Zugang zu Raspberry Pi zu ermöglichen, wird vorerst nur ein Gerät pro Kunde geliefert. Innerhalb der nächsten sieben Tage werden wir Ihnen weitere Informationen zu Ihrer Anfrage zukommen lassen. Sobald wir die Produkte auf Lager haben, werden wir diese in der Reihenfolge der Registrierungseingänge an Sie versenden.

Danke für Ihre Geduld, für weitere Details werden wir Sie schnellstmöglich kontaktieren.”

Welcome back Pi Team!
Hope you all are well rested!
I’m sorry to hear about all the hate mail that was received after the launch.

I would like to do one better and give some polite and constructive feedback on the communication prior to the launch.

The one complaint I have is that I honestly feel that we should have been notified in advance on the blog that the RPi store was

going to be totally abandoned.

For months the team were directing people to the “How To Buy” page over and over,
and the buying procedure really felt like it was set in stone.

It was extremely confusing and frustrating to come onto the raspberrypi.com Store only to see the “Down for Maintenance” message

which I assumed was an overloading message.
It was only about 3/4s of an hour later when I managed to load the .org page that I saw the new procedure to buy. And of course the

lack of an e-mail didn’t help either, but I see now that the mailing system was not able to handle the high amount of e-mails.

I just honestly felt like we were left in the dark, and there could have been much more transparency about the change,
without having to give away the “surprise” about the 2 new suppliers.

I found it a real anti-climax after being spoiled by information in Liz’s blog posts.
She always does her best to give us as much insight as possible, to the point where she hates when she can’t give certain details

and has to keep them a secret.

And I just have this gut feeling if she was assigned to make the last 2 announcements prior to launch, we would have been given a

better heads up of what to expect.

This was the one thing I kept thinking about after the launch that made me extremely dissapointed.
The lack of a securing an RPi for myself didn’t even come into those thoughts as I expected this due to the high odds.

I just think the big change could have been communicated much better.

Anyways, I’m glad to see the team and site back in action.

I have nothing but love for this project and total admiration for the completely selfless and charitable intent of the Foundation.
And I cannot wait to see the great accomplishments that will result from this project.
It is going to be extremely exciting once the community gets their paws on these boards, and of course the students in schools also.

well to be fair i think the problem here is that you didn’t really read the announcement as it specifically said to head to the .org site ;-)

(not that it helped me in the least to secure me a pi myself :-P )

Nicely said! Thanks for expressing all of my same feelings and turmoils when having to deal with the EXACT same experience when no email was sent out, as well as the site being shut down for two days! It truly was a horrid experience, and I will now hold off for quite a few months ’till I even consider purchasing this.

I had big plans for this baby, but I have now lost much interest due to the lack of notice, instructions, as well as cooperation on how to order when the time came to be.

I do wish everyone else whom was able to receive this product the best of luck, and can not wait to hear your experiences.

it’s getting really annoying, i even signed up at one of those shops(rs-components.com) and there is still no possibilty to order a rapsberry was this a ****** joke after all?

If yes i cant laugh about it, i really wanted one….

Sorry but im pretty ***** right now.

Approved after removing profanity.

Anyway, as I am sure you can see from many other comments, its was very difficult to order one – simply too many people wanted one. You can still have one, they are not a joke. You just need to order it from RS or Farnell. Their sites should be working OK now.

http://elinux.org/RPi_Buying_Guide#Ordering

At about 8:00 UTC I followed your advice and did the “just search for Raspberry Pi” at the german Farnell website. It found this in two categories

Analog/Power/Sensor/Wireless Entwicklungskits
MCU / MPU / DSC / DSP / FPGA Development Kits

While the second link didn’t work, the first link allowed me to order something called “RASPBERRY-PI – RASPBRRY-CHIPSET – CHIPSET, RASPBERRY PI, MODEL B” (2081347) and I even received an order confirmation for it.

However, in retrospect it looks like it’s to cheap to be the Model B. What is it, and why was/is it on sale? I guess I’m not the only one who ordered it.

I also registered my interest at the RS website, however I’m yet waiting for any confirmation email from them.
At Farnell, I also had to click a button that confirmed that I’m a business customer. Unfortunally, I’m not.

There are two reference for the Raspberry PI at two different prices for Farnell France too. I ordered the cheapest, 21,9€ but it seem very odd. There are no details on the product.
So, currently I’m not sure of what I ordered.
My order is confirmed (I have a confirmation ID) but I have no mail to know the shipping date estimation.

If you have more informations thanks to share, but I suppose that the foundation could have more information about this duplicate reference. I hope the foundation will grab some information about that.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: the chipset. Only the broadcom chip I believe. No PCB, no connectors, no housing, no nothing. Only the chipset. So I would cancel that order if I were you. Unless you can solder that ridiculously small BGA chip. ;)
Just search for item number 2081185 on farnell. That’s the full RPI you want. :)

Although you cannot actually buy the chip separately at the moment, so that seems a bit odd. Hopefully all will be explained next week.

I’m glad that you are aware of this problem. I think that a recap of the different offers available (with links) is very necessary.
A recap of all identified problems and their solutions should be great too.

I’m not going to cancel a confirmed order that says Raspberry Pi Model B, even if they stuck a “chipset” somewhere in the name. However, I hope that Farnell will autonomously correct those orders to deliver the right thing. It was absolute nonsense on their side to list this on launch day, if it really is a chipset only.

BTW, thanks to everyone at Raspberry Pi foundation to making it possible to buy such a small powerfull board. Unfortunately, the amount of problems created by Farnell and RS because they were unprepared for the launch seems to be very long.

[…] Zdroj: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/723 […]

The price in South Africa is pretty much $35 + VAT from RS (not sure about shipping since I can’t order yet). See my article http://www.gadget.co.za/pebble.asp?relid=4399 for more.

Just received a mail from Farnell “Pre-order your Raspberry Pi”
R Pi model B = € 33.07 + shipping + vat = € 53.90

For France !

I’m french too (bon on parle anglais histoire que les autres comprennent^^) and I received the same mail. But in the link, the annonced price is 44.82$ included VAT and shipping.
But the minimum shipping when I try to buy one is 12€…

here is my order :
http://www.nogentsurmarne.fr/farnell.jpg

I had the same… Too much for me ! I prefer giving more money to the Charity. I cancelled. Will try with the other one…

@Liz , is there any way you can talk to RS about all the users who showed interest,and filled out the form early 6:00-8:00 that still hasent received anything from them?

Did we loose our place,do we have to re-register?

RS have recently tweeted about their confirmation emails and updated FAQs:
http://www.designspark.com/knowledge/orders-raspberry-pi-your-questions-answered

To quote them:
“UPDATED: 3rd March 2012

We’re experiencing some delays in getting email confirmations out to everyone. Currently, we expect this activity to be complete by the end of Sunday 4th March, and will continue to update everyone via this page. Many apologies to anyone who’s been waiting for their email from us.”

I am from India.. Just wanna grab one of ur Model-B. when i checked in RS website it comes to 21.60 pounds(Roughly 1684.8 rupees-INDIAN currency). When i check in Element14(farnell) it comes to 2,350.00 rupees-INDIAN currency. Why is there such a big difference. I dont mind if the money goes for the product, but feel bad to give it to other sources other than raspberry pi. Please explain me if i had got something wrong and also tell me the way of buying the product in such a way that it is atleast near to the price that raspberrypi.org sells it.

I think the Farnell price includes delivery, but you will need to check that depending on where you are in the world

I belong to India. This website in addtion to the above said price(2,350.00 rupees-INDIAN currency) it adds shipping charges and other charges. It roughtly come to around 3,000 rupees-INDIAN Currency(equals to 60 US $ and 38 GBP pounds).

Although I report problems etc. I should also say I am in awe of the achievement of the team in getting this so far. Getting the design down to something so small and inexpensive, making the sort of design choices that make “inexpensive” not synonymous with useless and getting it into volume production all present massive challenges that many better resourced teams would fail.

At Farnell NL you don’t need a VAT. You can buy there as private person when:
– buying minimal 50€ ex. BTW (taxes)
– send orderform with fax or email

A better choice for distributing here in Holland should have been the company Conrad, which is aimed at the same group of customers you do.

Congratulations and well done to the entire team. I’ve been watching the RaspberryPi story since you went public with it and eagerly awaiting it’s release. So what if I don’t get one from the first batch (but I still may email from RS in that regard expected soon) at least I will be able to get one fairly soon. As a lecturer in CS who learned to code on a zx80 way back I have been increasingly disappointed in the decline of CS/IT in schools and colleges over recent years. Thanks to you and the RPi team we can hopefully reverse that decline and once again produce the next cohort of the world’s best software engineers in the UK. once again congratulations and kudos to the entire team who had a dream and seen it through to fruition :) absolutely great Job Three Cheers fro the Raspberry Pi Team!!!

Very well done to everyone at ras pi for such an amazing job and for so much positive excitement generated. You guys are doing a very “decent” thing.

I was on the “other” side of the constant F5s :)

I just recieved an email from farnell asking if I want to pre order.
When I follow the link and select my country. (the Netherlands) I’m told that I need a VAT number to order and the price of the Raspberry Pi is 33 euro’s. Which is more than 35 dollar. (Since this is the price for businesses VAT should not be included)
Also the price is different in every euro zone country. (Germany 35, Greece 31, Spain 37 …)
I don’t know what you agreed on with Farnell but I was under the impression that the price point excluding VAT was fixed and consumers should be able to order not only businesses. (This is what stopped me from buying one on Wednesday)

On launch day, I stayed awake until about 4:30 GMT, after which the screen was like a blur. I set my alarm for 5:47, but I guess I didn’t hear it. My normal 7:00 alarm woke me up, I rushed to the PC to try and order one, but then I saw the change in distribution. I tried to access RS and Farnell to no vail, but later on I managed to register my interest on Farnell. Just half an hour ago I received an email from then I can pre-order one from Farnell UK, and they even give out a free T-shirt.
The price ended up being:
£24.55 + £4.91 VAT for a total of £29.46 with free delivery.

I was told about the RPi just about 2 months ago, and since then I have told all of my friends, even family. I find it to be an impressive platform for education and gadgetry.
As for first planned use for the device, I don’t know, I want to do so many things with it… I guess when I eventually receive it, I will play around with it and improvise something out.

As for my background, I currently live in the UK and I am a first year BSc Computer Science undergraduate. In secondary school I absolutely hated ICT, and didn’t take it as a GCSE option. I also made a big effort into getting a 6th form college that offered Computing A-Level, as I like tinkering with computers, but I would NOT stand an ICT A-Level. I support the idea of the RPi Foundation of improving the curriculum as its current state is just…

As for the RPi device itself, I can see teaching my little cousin programming and anyone else who is interested. I tried a couple of years ago teaching her VB.NET, but I guess I rushed into it a bit too quickly, as she had her computer for about a year and was still very unsure as to how to do basic things with it.
The choice of Python as the main language for the RPi seems reasonable, actually I love it, as out of the languages I tried ( VB.NET, C#, Java, Python, C) I find Python the most pleasant to work with, second is Java.

Programming aside, I managed to make her switch to Linux, even though her laptop is dual-boot. This will make it easier as she will be more familiar with the environment. I have introduced Linux to some of my friends and family as well.

I would like to thank the Foundation for the idea of the RPi, but also making it reality.

The Raspberry Pi Story

Some time ago, a small group of people noticed a problem. Instead of bitching and moving on – like the rest of us do – they decided to get off their backsides and do something about it.

They spent the next six years working hard in their spare time on the project. They spent lots of their own money and some even gave up their jobs. They developed, designed and built a brilliant, unique, affordable computer the size of a credit card. They didn’t do it to make money and they didn’t do it for fame. They did it because they believed that they could make a difference. Whether it will remains to be seen, but based on the unprecedented – unimaginable – interest they have done something very right.

And no, these things in themselves shouldn’t make them immune from hard questions and constructive criticism. But it certainly doesn’t make them fair game for hate mail; irrational, misdirected outrage; or sickening, personal attacks. And for those who have said, “I would have done it better” – you didn’t and you couldn’t.

I understand the disappointment and the frustration (no, I didn’t get one either :)) but the anger is just dysfunctional. It’s a waiting list for consumer electronics, not a kidney transplant. Perspective and patience are the words of the day. Things will get sorted. You will get your Pi.

So despite all the hiccups, all I can say to the Raspberry Pi Foundation is: Thank you very much. You’ve done good.

[If any Hollywood directors would like to use this when they film “The Raspberry Pi Story” then it’s CC Attrib :D]

registered interest with R.S quite early but still have had no email. however have found this http://www.designspark.com/content/get-your-raspberry-pi-rs-components note time and date
Anyway congrats on the release you have all worked hard

“It’s a waiting list for consumer electronics, not a kidney transplant. ”

Although you can give a Kidney if you want to help people on the Transplant list. http://www.uktransplant.org.uk/ukt/about_transplants/organ_allocation/kidney_%28renal%29/living_donation/altruistic_nondirected_donation.jsp
(I work as an IT bod for a kidney unit)

They are more than welcome to both of them when I’m dead. But not a moment before. :)

Amen to that. Kudos to the R.PI team for getting it Out There.

+1000000
The oddest thing is the critics really seem to lack the basic social skills to realise what utter, utter morons they appear to be. (No I didn’t get one either but the world is still spinning)

Indeed… I know this is curmudgeon talk, but I suspect it hasn’t helped that a couple of generation have been raised with “you are unique and special and should feel great about yourself no matter what” whalesong ringing in their ears. They wanted one of these very very much, so felt entitled to lash out (on the Internet, of course, it’s much easier) when they couldn’t get one as soon as they expected. The fact that there were ten wanters for every wanted thing was offset by the deep knowledge that they were special and deserved it more.

A message to any such person: I’m unique. You’re unique. So is everybody else. So is every car license plate. Are they all special? What makes you special is what you add to the world, and how you treat all the other unique people.

First off al thank you for bringing the Raspberrypi to life.

It appears to me that you don’t have much experience how business works. Given the price hike by the suppliers I wander if the $25 and $35 price tags were Whole sale prices. In witch case I can understand the price hike.

On the other hand if the $25 / $35 price include a healthy profit. You made a mistake by not taking control over the sales price.
To me it seems that by licensing the Raspberrypie you lost control over your child…

A solution would have been to raise money for production by pre-setting or using “kickstarter.com” to raise capital and use Amazon for distribution.

Lets hope most people will refuse to buy from Farnell until they have adjusted their prices.

Could you be anymore insulting in your praise I wonder?

The Farnell unit price includes basic shipping the RS unit prices does not. In the UK when you add in 20% VAT you get the £29.60 price from Farnell and from RS (inc delivery) you get £31.86.

So Farnell are charging around £2.95 for basic UK delivery (RS charge £4.95) which is typical these days. If you look at the $35 that is around £21.87 at today’s exchange rate (which almost no one but banks get). So I think the distributors are being very fair and sticking to the $35 unit cost .. read the FAQ it says its $35 + taxes.

ScooterIT was referring Farnell’s overseas prices which are through the roof. Read this thread: 54€ in France, pre-tax prices that are varying by tens of euros (when import regulations are uniform across the EU), a random $20 charge (corrected since) for the USA…

It is definitely fair to tell people to wait a bit, and not pre-order before they’ve found a decent supplier for their country; I’d like to give my money to RS if they play fairly and Farnell doesn’t. Otherwise, I can wait for the ability to make bulk orders.

Unfortunately many of us will have to wait but thats okay because we will all have a piece of Pi very soon. What I am not happy about is that the Canadian distributor (Newark) will not accept Paypal. I don’t use credit cards so I don’t even know for sure if I can get one from them. Whats with companies that don’t yet use Paypal or Internet banking. I bet when I set up an account to purchase a Pi that part of the account requirement will be a credit card number.

What an unbelievably awesome launch!! Cant believe the result. I dont understant why people complain I guess you cant make everyone happy no matter what.

So many people wanting one of these pcs it brought down 2 of the biggest electronic distributors in the worlds main web sites LOL.

Congrats to everyone in rasberry pi team and for actually taking the time to reply to people comments questions etc!

practices of these two dealers are quite complicated and dubious. Farnell offers us a very ugly and marketing Tshirt rs Componant asks us to be a business and give them an address to receive the pub. It’s not terrible for a charitable purpose! I hope that it’s going to get better …

[…] raspberrypi.org via winfuture.de Tweet !function(d,s,id){var […]

Hi there Liz and Eben, all of you working on this and to the community here.

I am from Germany and also set my alarmclock to get up at time.
At 7:05 I placed my Interest on the RS Website. There was no way to ORDER the RPi. Only placing interest was possible.
So after some minutes I recognized that the Link to RS you playced on your static WebPage at (raspberrypi.org) tokk me directly to the
UK Distributor. So I thought : “Shit” I need to place my interest again but now on the german RS Page. As you know the Websites
of both of the Distributors hat to struggle with DDoS and after 30 minutes I was able to Place my interest on the German RS Page.
Also no way to “ORDER” the RPi.

Parallely I also tried it with Farnell. It was a PITA to go through the whole Order Process but I managed to get an order in Place but with NO
precise delivery date set. Only the Information I will get an Email when they know more.

In the End I was really glad to got through the order which many of us couldn’t but looking at the final Price
I was a bit disappointed. Especially the Postage is in my Opinion way too high. They can send it with DHL for the half of it.

This is what I need to pay:
Warenwert: 27,07 €
Versandkosten: 7,95 €
MwSt.: 6,65 €
Gesamt: 41,67 €

7,95€ for delivery is to much. But I am happy to be able to get through the Ordering Process at 7:01 GMT+1. Before that the Page was unreacheable. Even 5 of my frieds didnt managed to get
through the ordering process till 9:00 GMT+1 ….

Till now I also didn’t got any Information Email from neither RS nor Farnell. With every day I get the impression that I wont be able to get my hands on the RaspberryPi, because of some complications
on RS’s or Farnell’s side. Even if I was able to place my interest at RS some minutes after Start and get through the Ordering Process really early at Farnell.

So hoping the best.
Greetings Ronald :)

Let me start with saying that I have been following this site for more then a half a year now and am still looking forward to getting my pi. And I am wildly impressed by all the amazing work put in by everybody.

But I have noticed one thing, you guys are really bad at taking advice and receiving any form off critically put feedback. A few examples:
* Build time was delayed because off Chinese new year, which someone warned about and got a snide comment like “do you really think we haven’t thought off that” apparently not….
* The launch blew chunks because the shops could not handle all the traffic, which you were warned about by many people, but always answered with “that the servers where made off steel” and we all know what has happened…. And when people complained about that last Wednesday the answer was “but our page is accessible, it’s their fault”.
That fact coupled with communication problems with the 2 partners on the day is a bit amateurish (is that a good english word btw?)

I know from experience that a launch off this magnitude is incredibly difficult to handle and that keeping a shop up in those conditions is near impossible.

But after all that I am not mad and know that you all are doing the very best you can and are dependable on other parties, so no hard feelings, but it might be a good idea to listen to everybody who visits this site because there are a lot off people with way more experience with keeping up sites under a heavy load and stuff like dealing with the Chinese around their new year.

Maybe it’s a cultural difference but in my opinion asking for help, or taking advice or admitting that things did not go okay is not a bad thing….

Chinese NY wasn’t the only problem unfortunately.
Once of the reasons for going to RS/Farnell was because they do have MUCH bigger servers than anything the Foundation could put in place. Both RS and Farnell expected their servers to handle the load, but they and us were stunned by the actual demand. I’m not sure, but its possible the only servers system capable of handling that level of demand would be Google Amazon or Ebay (RS got 1000hits/second over one 15 minute period). None of whom manufacture, which was one of the other reasons for going to RS/Farnell.

I’m not sure what else the Foundation could have done.

Heyho, assuming other people servers are big enough, and then proclaiming it was probably a mistake! But then, the result would have been exactly the same whatever we would have done.

Not half: hindsight is a beautiful thing.

All things considered I think I came out pretty well. I stayed up bleary-eyed til the stroke of midnight (launch time for Alabama USA) and was gobsmacked by the DDOS mess on what seemed to be UK-order-only websites anyway. Considering the international interest on Rpi, seems to me the static page should have had a list of “local” order sites by country, but oh well. I gave up after 15 minutes and went to bed. In the morning when I could think straight I did my Google homework to get the Newark / Allied connection and placed an an actual order on Newark 10.5 hours after launch. Seems getting some sleep and letting them get their act together worked for me. The original ship date given on my email invoice was May 10; now I check at my account at the website and their database now says ship is April 03. So…thirty days til Pi? Sounds like a win to me.

Liz, could you please add on to your list of things you are covering with Farnell/RS that they leave the GPIO header holes empty and do not install a header? My expansion board layout is progressing nicely and I’ll be contacting you about it soon, some neat capabilities I think the Foundation will be interested in. Congrats to your whole team for riding the whitewater and not tipping over the raft!

The GPIO will be an unpopulated series of small holes, you got your wish by default :-)

This launch was a joke.

You were warned times and times again by members here of future issues that you were going to have, you guys always ignored everyone and replied with arrogant texts as If you had thought of everything and everything was under control.

Well you were proven, once, twice, and more how incompetent you are.

Why don’t you guys assume your incompetence and let someone that actually knows anything about marketing and logistics do their job since you clearly can’t do It?

I hate you for that.

I hate you because your arrogance will be responsible for the failure of this project. You are limiting the potential of the project.

Well, for a joke, it seem to have sold rather a lot, and made an awful lot of money for the charity involved that can be reinvested in to it primary purpose – teaching computing properly.

Thank for you comments, we really appreciate you insulting all the very experienced business people like that. I sure your company (you do run a company, don’t you? Or are you just a troll?) would do stunningly well in the same, completely unpredicted circumstances. And yes, all the stuff people beforehand was taken in to account, and demand was STILL higher than expected.

And its really quite amusing you think the project is a failure. A failure would have been all the servers working fine, and not selling all 10k boards in the first year.

To be be honest, I hate you too. You obviously have very little grasp of the problems involved. Has it not occurred to you that moving to RS and Farnell means more boards will be made, more boards will end up in end users hand, than ever could have been done by the Foundation alone? No I guess not, because you really haven’t thought this through. That’s your arrogance. The foundations mistake was underestimation of demand, and overestimation on the behalf of the suppliers in the robustness of their servers.

I let this comment through so others could get some idea of the content of the emails the Foundation have been getting. There really are some arsehats out there.

There are no-end of back-seat drivers on the internet. Their words are cheap. Their actions few.

If the Foundation listened to them then the Model B would have anywhere between 0 and 15 USB ports, VGA, blue leds along the edge, a glittery PCB, need an ATX power supply and cost around $400 on pre-order, only be available to freemasons and be released around 2015.

No one of the calibre of RS, element14 or Amazon would touch the distribution either.

In fact there are probably a few projects like this already. You’ve never heard of them, because they were dead before they even got started.

Actually, I wanted blue LED’s

My unsolicited advice: let us try to answer the problem of “getting the Pi in the hands of developers”. As it happens now, the Foundation will have to move the global distribution system of 2 companies just to accomplish this FIRST goal (the problem at hand).

“Why don’t you guys assume your incompetence and let someone that actually knows anything about marketing and logistics do their job since you clearly can’t do It? ”

You might want to have a look at the list of the Trustees before you embarrass yourself with rants like that in future.

Will, you sound super-smart, I think you should go off and do a Pi alternative all yourself or just direct your “hate” filled comments to /dev/null

[…] And breathe… Raspberry Pi, a che punto siamo ::: Raspberry Pi […]

I got a email from farnell saying I can order mine but when i get to registratio it asks for my company NIF(“N.I.F. empresa” in portuguese). What does this even mean? Does it mean I can only order if I’m part of a company?–” Not very well explained and as such I can’t order

you have to choose from consumer or business. I guess you have chosen business. In either case, your NIF is your “Número de Identificação Fiscal ou seja, número de contribuinte”.

Eben, Liz

Warning: Someone had announced a Raspberry Pi, model B for sale on ebay:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-ARM-700MHz-256MB-RAM-Credit-Card-Size-Computer-1080p-Player-/170795586578?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item27c435d412#ht_500wt_1156

Interesting, it was costing me about 40 dollars to order the 35$ board from you and now from Farnell it goes up to 51$?

Phew! welcome back!! R-pi’ers

After in initial disappointment of not being able to order a R-Pi “On the day”, I’ve decided to wait till the end of the month to order mine. That and the fact I went in a huff and used my R-Pi cash to buy a new Kindle >_< didn't help… lol

So i'm now getting to grips with python programming, in order to try and do something fun with my R-Pi when I order one.

I’ve paid for my Raspberry 55 dollars (in Romania). I’ not complaining about the price, is just you’ve said it will be around 35$. I hope I’ll forget this as soon as I get in touch with my Raspberry.

This is what happens when European company is chosen to handle logistics. Of course they will overcharge. If the licensing agreement was done with a Chinese company shipping would be $5 worldwide with no additional mickey mouse fees on top, no VAT no tax on VAT no tax on the tax of VAT…

I’m from Romania, too, but I’d be damned if I could figure out how exactly and where to order it at the time.

I only got “post stuff here if you’re interested” forms, with no actual option to buy it.

I wasn’t expecting to buy it at actually $35… but maybe $50 with shipping and tax.

If you ended up paying $55 I’m kind of disappointed.

@znuff Have you applied for pre-order? I’ve registered on both sites, but it seems like farnell are faster. I’ve received an e-mail yesterday in which they announced me that I can place my order. I’ve also received an e-mail with the confirmation of my order. Good luck!

Details of my ro.farnell.com order (assuming friday’s official BNR exchange rate of 3.2843 RON/USD):

RASPBERRY-PI RASPBRRY-PCBA : 116.54 RON = 35.5 USD
Shipping (UPS ground) : 20.00 RON = 6 USD
TVA (Romanian 24% VAT) : 32.77 RON
Total : 169.31 RON = 51.11 USD

Right on the money, as real bank exchange rates are 1-2% higher.
Non-EU imports still get the 24% VAT added at the customs.
And it’s “Sir, when can i come to your house and hand-deliver you this” UPS shipping and non (wait one hour in line at the post office if you’re lucky enough and it was not lost or smashed) Romanian Post.

Let’s hope we’ll get our RPi in healthy conditions. When I check my order, under “pozitia comenzii” is written “primit”. How is your status? Do you know anything about delivery time?

Glad that the Pi has semi-launched

The 29th itself was However, a complete and utter farce!

What was the reasoning behind having an ridiculously early (6am) announcement – About a launch which failed to happen (pre-order everywhere!)
Was it just a marketing thing to get so hype about the product – Was that REALLY worth setting my alarm for ??????

Why was it stated that “you can start buying the Raspberry Pi today” even though the units are still in china (as also stated on the static page) ?
Plus both RS and Farnell (UK) only ever had “..express an interest..” on their sites – Which both crashed 20 secs after ‘launch’ ???

How come the price went from £22 to £26.55 + tax (at Farnell) an increase of 20+% overnight ?

I’m curious how this is justified – when the price was meant to be set in stone.

And 20% is a HUGE price increase!!!

I realize that much of the mess wasn’t directly your fault – your partners let you down badly, such a anti climax, after such a huge build up.

I really think this was buy far your WORST descision to date using these to 3rd-party ‘partners’

Raspberry Pi is a Chartiy, correct ? And RS & Farnell are both profit based business’s, corrrect? Business + Charity = bad idea.

One last thing..

I can’t really understand why your blaming “too much interest” on why things went wrong – You had 100,00+ people on your priority emailing list, eagerly awaiting the launch – what did you think would happen ???

Anyway,

Rant over. Now looking forward to eventually receiving my Pi which will be here in approx 2 months according to Farnell.

6am UK, its a worldwide launch, so not everyone had to get up early! For example, in South Korea it’s mid afternoon. No alarms necessary.

The price at Farnell is being investigated – its shoudl have been $35, plus shipping + tax. It may be the price you saw included tax and shipping.

Going with RS and Farnell is a good idea, as has been explained elsewhere. Contracts are in place to ensure it stays a good idea. Most charities deal with business at some point.

We had 100k on the mailing list. Servers could have coped with 100k people. Draw your own conclusions.

I realize that it was a worldwide launch BUT by a charity based in the UK, so timezone related stuff should be based on GMT.

A correction on the Price, It is actually:

£24.55 ($38.90) + Tax (£4.91)

= £29.46 ($46.7) (Shipping NOT included)

So, not quite the $35 we were initially told.

Still 20%(+/-) Increase!!

And of course charities and business’s deal with each other but on this case it certainly hasn’t worked – so far!,

Don’t get me wrong I’m sure it’ll improve – can’t get much worse that the start they made.

If I was working for RasPi – I would to totally Pi**ed at RS and Farnell over the way they BOTH handled the launch – they were nothing short of incompetent!

Although initially there were problems, they have stepped up to the plate and things have got a lot better. I guess some heads were banged together.

Not sure about you exchange rate calc though! Most people calculations have given figures much closer to $35 (and sometimes less).

More information next week on how the figures work out.

It’s £29.46 including tax and free shipping. I’ve just ordered mine. I really don’t know why people are making such a big deal about a small price increase. You’re only talking about a couple of quids difference in price. It’s not even the price of a good cup of coffee.

$46.7 – instead of $35, In percentage term that a huge increase

FYI re Farnell pricing, I ordered earlier today (Sat 3rd) and the price quoted was £24-something sans-VAT which I assumed to be £22 + shipping. I purchased via my business, (so £24.something), otherwise the VAT would’ve put the total price at £29.something.

I’m in the UK btw!

No way. Farnell cannot handle 100k people pounding on them at 6AM.

Farnell website is very fragile. It slows down often during the electronic components ordering rush hour. It is not capable of handling a few thousand customers above normal traffic.

If they say they got 6times more traffic than normal, we can conclude nothing from that statement. As their site was giving out proxy errors all the time, many people will have been retrying the requests to try and get through.

And I find it quite likely that they size their “link with the internet” to acomodate about 6 times normal traffic. So if they see “6 times more than normal” traffic it could be that their upstream pipe was just saturated.

If you argue: “but farnell has competent engineers” I’ll have to say: “then it would be wise to USE them”.

If you’re looking for a resistor, you’ll be looking for a 1k resistor. So a tickbox in the parametric search tool for “1k” is nice and good.

Now if I’m looking for a 1W resistor, the “1W” tickbox becomes less useful. A 2W resistor will be fine as well. Especially if its smaller, cheaper or things like that. So why rule them out?

Those are reasonably sensible. However with say “mosfets”, it makes no sense to search for a 61.8 AMP mosfet. http://nl.farnell.com/jsp/search/browse.jsp?N=204245+110138089&No=0&getResults=true&appliedparametrics=true&locale=nl_NL&divisionLocale=nl_NL&catalogId=&skipManufacturer=false&skipParametricAttributeId=&prevNValues=204245&mm=1000019||,&filtersHidden=false&appliedHidden=false&autoApply=false&originalQueryURL=%2Fjsp%2Fsearch%2Fbrowse.jsp%3FN%3D204245%26No%3D0%26getResults%3Dtrue%26appliedparametrics%3Dtrue%26locale%3Dnl_NL%26divisionLocale%3Dnl_NL%26catalogId%3D%26skipManufacturer%3Dfalse%26skipParametricAttributeId%3D%26prevNValues%3D204245

And including those “weird” values makes that list horribly wrong.

After two years of complaining about this they made it possible for me to look for “more than 50A” mosfets.

However when I select that option, internally they just check all the tickboxes above 50A.
http://nl.farnell.com/jsp/search/browse.jsp?N=204245+110138089+110022468+110022514+110053033+110127502+110070876+110022492+110037435+110022501+110105560+110045758+110099572+110037408+110097668+110022487+110007646+110111681+110007573+110079623+110090194+110100546+110075667+110022471+110112033+110070250+110328617+110037533+110116811+110072719+110113450+110106812+110415701+110114930+110058516+110037488+110022522+110075022+110058592+110092436+110100806+110044604+110037532+110037949+110057565+110037487+110116145+110082674+110007525+110067188+110095414+110062362+110007668+110049524+110089344+110022469+110070302+110022542+110052672+110007572+110058420+110086924+110323495+110022583+110086567+110022551+110046908+110056854+110091284+110022963+110067928+110062699+110082259+110007574+110085061+110148480+110055628+110316133+110090625+110043349+110067146+110037475+110054039+110007580+110137649+110181460+110074158+110037484+110096598+110184031+110037400+110075841+110037477+110059635+110104702+110066839+110022470+110037402+110062652+110330145+110061808+110052260+110148465+110110417+110091363+110092863+110083146+110022592+110057087+110037563+110085967+110109728+110037553+110060361+110066625+110022972&No=0&getResults=true&appliedparametrics=true&locale=nl_NL&divisionLocale=nl_NL&catalogId=&skipManufacturer=false&skipParametricAttributeId=&prevNValues=204245+110138089&mm=1000019|110022468|,&filtersHidden=false&appliedHidden=false&autoApply=false&originalQueryURL=%2Fjsp%2Fsearch%2Fbrowse.jsp%3FN%3D204245%26No%3D0%26getResults%3Dtrue%26appliedparametrics%3Dtrue%26locale%3Dnl_NL%26divisionLocale%3Dnl_NL%26catalogId%3D%26skipManufacturer%3Dfalse%26skipParametricAttributeId%3D%26prevNValues%3D204245

This is “proof” that they did not design their web-interface properly, and it of course ensures that their website cannot handle much above their average traffic.

Just cut-paste the complete URLs above into your browser. The URL detection software in this “forum” is broken too….

So now that I have my order in I’m wondering if it would be more appropriate to lay in a supply of Newcastle Brown or Fuller’s ESB to celebrate the arrival? Liz?

at last got to order 1 to day from farnell 3 march did not get email from foundation adout the sale so much for mailing list .Cannot wait to get it in a month or so

The next time the foundation launches a world wide phenomenon device, please dispense with the ‘set the alarm clock’ antics. The wait and inability to order left something of a bad taste for raspberries.

I’ll place an order when stock is available at Newark in the US.
By then, I am sure Broadcom will be a bit more forthcoming with the published data for the CPU. After all, Broadcom computers are now firmly in the spotlight. The ARM universe is Broadcom’s to lose if they keep details of the device closed.

The hardware hacking/OS writing communities will be cranky indeed if not given enough information to look around in every nook and cranny of the BCM2835.

Addendum:
Since there are many novice computer people on the forums, I will try and give some background and computer history.

1) Your desktop PC is most likely using an Intel architecture computer chip, first developed in the 1980’s. The existing body of software for i386 type computer chips is vast. As you may know, Intel and Microsoft partnered together many years ago to dominate the personal computer space.

2) The RasPi uses a different computer architecture. It is based on a Cambridge University designed architecture. The designers, ARM Holdings plc. license this architecture to many different chip manufacturers. They do not make chips themselves. The ARM architecture has been wildly popular, but usually in the computers you don’t see. Cars, appliances, communications gear and the like.

3) The chip manufacturers add goodies of their own design. In the case of Broadcom and RasPi, the video section of the BCM2835 was developed in-house by Broadcom. This is a valuable trade secret. Bradcom is likely to lose revenue to competitors if too much information is released about this area of the BCM2835.

4) From the software side, the RasPi will be running what is known as Open Source software. The genesis of Open Source can be traced back to Richard Stallman, who started the GNU project. Many years of GNU accumulated UNIX software were formed into the Linux OS by Linus Torvalds.

5) The main area of excitement to me about the RasPi is a widely available ARM device for the Open Source community to use as a reference platform. To date, Open Source software for the ARM architecture is somewhat fragmented due the many similar, but slightly different flavors of chips available.

6) Thus, my hope that Broadcom has an even newer video section ready for release, and will in effect, ‘give away’ valuable trade secrets to the Open Source community of the BCM2835.

Hi Team,

First of all: Thank you for all the energy, time and love that you put into this project. Some trolls sure seem to spend a lot of time in making you feel miserable. If all of them would only put that energy in something constructive (or their homework) the world would soon be a better place.

You put an awful lot of money into ordering the first batch. I’m just wondering how many of the trolls offered their private money to increase the size of the first batch. Given a batch size of 10K units, it’s to be expected that you can only sell those 10K units and not another several million units at launch time.

Giving up the selling of the RasPi’s to professionals was a strong and wise decision that many developers are not willing to make (letting go of a child). Many start-up initiatives have died because of this. You have proven capable of putting your goals before your personality. My compliments on that as well.

I see one problem however: as things stand now, the next batches will be claimed mostly by nerds (like me) and people that expect it to be an XBOX. Most teachers might not be able to get their hands on a RasPi in time to prepare for next year’s curriculum. It’s March, and the new school year is closer than most of us realize. Allowing the teachers to get used to the new tool and incorporate it into their courses will need some time (and some gentle helping hands by us nerds).

In your shoes, I would try to make sure that as soon as possible enough units make their way to British teachers so they can work on their curriculum for the next year.

PS:
I didn’t react at first, but it keeps nagging me: did you notice that when Chris apologized for not making the deadline because he was ill, that NO ONE offered a “Glad to hear you are well again, your health is more important than the charity?”

From the bottom of my heart: Chris, good to hear you are well again; don’t risk your health or your well-being for the project; remember the goal is to improve education, not making insatiable trolls content. From what I see, I think you and your team are doing a marvelous job.

Thanks!

Been lurking this board for 9 to 10 months…. waiting ….. waiting….waiting… even got up for 06:00, registered, F5, F5, F5, f5, f5 , register interest, twitter.. wait F5 repeat,the same as everyone else….. not a single email recieved….
The publicity is good, but have to say the inability to actually give my pound / $ to anyone is a major downer. I will wait, but how many have you lost ?
I realize the foundation is a not for profit, however the ‘soon’ ‘next week’ and ‘read the FAQ’ (yes I have read it), you’re getting the Duke Nukem feel.

Get some ‘marketing’ ‘corporate communications’ ‘investor relations’ you have created a monster (which in itself is good – but not what you specialize in)

Personally I am a techie with no desire or skill to be management or IT strategy. Please take note, get advice.

Anyway, enough of the negative and the troll like post.

I sincerly hope the RPi is a sucess and I still want one. All the best.

Regards J

I believe we have actually sold many more than expected. So although we may have lost some thought the teething troubles, we actually gained more than expected . If that makes sense!

The troubles could recur if Farnell and RS are using the numbers from their “Register your interest” pages for sizing their next batch orders. Those registration numbers are never going to reflect the actual level of demand, not by an order of magnitude or more.

And that’s without even considering that many enthusiasts like myself intend to buy a whole pile of units. I will however only buy when they’re in stock, as I do with everything I buy from Farnell (a great supplier, btw).

If you have any sway with the two companies, please knock this “Register your interest” thing on its head. It makes no sense when the ratio of demand to supply is at least 100:1.

We don’t want another stampede and more gnashing of teeth, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen if there aren’t several hundred thousand units spread between the two companies, minimum, so that stocks don’t disappear within hours. “Register your interest” won’t capture those numbers, only the visible tip of the iceberg.

Morgaine.

Warning incoming essay: I was a little disappointed in how the launch was handled, now I’m not sure exactly where the problems came in, either from the partners or from the foundation, I suspect a little of both.

Now I did get up early to try and order at 6am, however I didn’t expect to get one.
The night before I did the math, 100k on mailing list, well there are bound to be at least as many didn’t bother registering, so that’s 200k. Then there are those from the various other sites BBC etc who will see the links and try and get one, so say double again and add a bit for good measure. 500k people in the first day will express interest, not all necessarily order (even if there were enough), but will go to the site etc.
So as I say I wasn’t expecting to get one, but was expecting to be able to get a clear understanding of what was going on, and possibly some timescales. The news you guys were using partners was a surprise, but one which does make sense and I’m happy with.

What actually happens seemed to be a major breakdown in communication.
First the partners obviously didn’t realise the scale of the traffic they were going to get. As I say I don’t know if this is that the foundation didn’t make it clear to them, or they just didn’t prepare. For me the RS site was intermittently available, and the Farnell site wasn’t available at all until around midday. There are various things they could have done to ease the load and handle the failure gracefully.

Then there was the whole you couldn’t (and still can’t) actually buy one. Apparently there were some lucky people who have been able to. But for me the RS site has only had a register interest form on it. I have filled this (about 6:04) and have not heard anything from them (yes I have checked my spam folder). Now if we were told this would happen find, however on Twitter we were told “If you’re only seeing “register an interest” on RS’s site, you’re on the wrong page.”. Which from what I can tell was incorrect. Again seems a lack of communication between the foundation and the partners (and therefore us) about how the launch was going to happen.

So as I say I registered pre interest on the RS site straight away, and the Elements 14 site (which it was changed to part way through the day) at just after lunch when the site was available.
I have had no email from both. If you go to both site you still only get the preregister form and no way to order. So more than 3 days later I still haven’t been able to place and order or get into the queue which people seem to be in to get one.
I find this quite frustrating.
I know there are a few direct links floating around, but I’m trying to approach this from the “correct” way of doing things and it seems that its impossible to order one currently?
Oh and since its relevant I am in the UK.

I know you’re a very small foundation, and I support the goal of the project, and I’m willing to be patient, however this lack of knowing when I can order one with everyone seeming to say everything is fine is quite frustrating. Even this post says it doesn’t matter the email didn’t go out to everyone as you’ll be at the end of a shorter queue. The problem is I can’t even get on the queue?!

So summary.
Disappointed with the communication / organisation of the initial launch, but can be forgiven since this was a bit of new special thing.
Still disappointed there doesn’t seem to be a legitimate way to pre order now in the UK!

And breath
Oh and congratulations on producing such a popular product, and look forward to seeing where the project goes from here once the dust settles.
And I do feel sorry about the hate you are getting from some people, it does seem unfortunate that some people jump straight to hate (especially at the personal level) when there is a problem.

Regards
QGazQ

Also sorry for the typos which make reading my post more difficult, I am terrible for it. If I could edit I’d go fix the ones I’ve now seen.

Well written, QGazQ.

While I love the Raspberry Pi and everyone involved, it’s very discouraging to see the insightful folks at the Foundation hitting back against the very people who support them when they describe their experience of the launch disaster.

Does the Foundation *really* want genuine feedback, or only feedback that says how excellently it all went? I’m hoping that they’re genuine in their request for all feedback. Yes, we know that it must be very disappointing to hear the bitter experiences of the majority after all their incredibly hard work, but what happened happened, and they need to be big boys and girls and just accept it. That’s the only way to guarantee that it won’t happen again in the future.

We all love the Raspberry Pi, or we wouldn’t be here. Even those who make an honest (and disappointing) appraisal of an event that went badly wrong.. :-)

Morgaine.

Feedback, yes. Hatemail, no.

Am afraid that until the goal/problem of “getting the Pi in the hands of developers” is addressed, this kind of post will keep coming in.

Hi over there at raspberry pi,

I’m just a guy that has been lurking around on your page in the last months and I’m quite fascinated about the possibilities such a cheap computer system offers.

I also wanna congratulate you guys for the successful launch. Don’t listen to all the haters… Certainly you could sell the same piece of hardware much, much more expensive and even earn the money to live with it – so I guess most people deeply appreciate that you offer this device pretty much “for free” to everybody.

Noone will die from waiting a couple of weeks and months for the device, and once the initial hype is over, they will be available quite regularly on RS an Farnell.

So, enough said, except: Thank You very much from Germany.

Chris

Farwell and RS told me different things.
(via telephone and at the embedded world in Nürnberg)
They say they do not sell to Private Customers in Germany.
Also If you want to Order, you have to fill out the Company Field.
So where can we Germans order it?

That sounds like a mistake by them. They should be available to anyone. We hope to have these issued sorted out next week.

I had noticed that the company field at RS Components’ inteterst page had changed from required to optional.

I had checked 5 other countries, and the field is now optional in all countries (I looked at).

Good news!

I was told the same thing by the Dutch RS division. Only registered companies can buy and order.

As I read through these comments I’m beginning to think I might actually have qualified for one of the first 10k boards. My initial disappointment and frustration is turning into quiet optimism. I got onto RS at about 06:01 on Wednesday and filled in the Register Your Interest form even though I thought it was wrong and that I should be looking to add a product to a basket. After I submitted the form I saw a thank you page but no confirmatory email. I received an email (in English!) from RS early evening on Thursday promising further information within 7 days. Reading the FAQ on RS’ site today, it seems that I might after all have been lucky. If I am, I will cancel the order I placed at Farnell on Friday and someone else can have something to look forward to in April.

What happened to the “1 order per customer/address” ?
I know someone that ordered 2 by telephone for delivery end or March….!

why are not sales on ebay.com ? for me keeps indoors to order to Russia :(((!

A great event for sure, congratulation !!!
Anyway, I am a little bit disappointed by the final price set by the French Farnell Store : this is about twice the original price of this fantastic card (more than 50€). IMHO, the cost of the sale an delivery process is disproportionate and most of your effort to bring a very low cost card is cancelled by it. it still very cheap but I think that the philosophy is finally impacted. intelligence is not in delivery but in the product !.
Regards, Arnaud

Quick question – I was really hoping that eventually you would have available a buy one/gift one type program. Do you think that could still happen given the move to external distributors? Hopefully this arrangement doesn’t preclude that sort of thing, I know a lot of us would like to support the goal of getting the RPi in the hands of as many educators as possible.

Yes, it’s part of the work the charity should be doing once we’re selling to schools.

First of all: Congratulations on a successful launch! I will be getting a Pi later when I have the time and disposable income. I’ve never got around to thanking you for this project. It’s such a wonderful idea and I really hope it succeeds in it’s main aim (being an electronics guy I am not afraid of hoards of CompScis taking my job :) ).

Also personally I like the plan with going with RS and Farnell. Partly because I already have a Farnell account and also because they take over the time-consuming part sourcing and manufacture and have the ability to make larger batches more quickly – win-win as I see it.

Now the main reason for posting. I don’t normally comment on these things but I just want to add my voice in disgust at loathsome jerks who seem to have issues with keeping things in perspective. The sense of entitlement some people seem to have is ridiculus. I really hope that positive messages outnumber the negative ones.

[Addressing said loathsome jerks]
Grow up! I know this is the internet so you can be as unpleasant as you like and there are no consequences for you but there are real people at the other end of the tube. You wouldn’t act like this in person (if you do you are a disgusting human being) so why do you feel the need to vent your bile on a bunch of volunteers doing a little bit of good.
The launch wasn’t perfect. So what? Companies with multi million pound budgets don’t always get it right. Small charities should be cut a little slack. The demand for the R-Pi was likely to be largest at launch then tail off to a more constant level anyway. Now that the R-Pi has been launched the RS and Farnell websites will probably be fine.
This isn’t supposed to be about you anyway. It’s supposed to be a learning tool for children to inspire them more than the pointless waste of time that is ICT.
So you haven’t got one from the first batch. Surely you must have realised that the odds were against you anyway. The software hasn’t even been finalised yet and there’s probably a few bugs left in whatever you wanted to use on it anyway so just take a deep breath and wait a little longer.
I suppose the problem was that they were too nice to you. They told you pretty much everything they could and you wanted more. They’ve been fairly lenient on the forums and generally lovely people. Easy people to abuse as they won’t hurt you back :( I’d have snapped months ago.

It might be nice if you were to apologise. Since you vented in public a public apology would be nice and show a good example to the others but I’m sure Liz and JamesH etc would forgive you if you sent them a suitably contrite and apologetic email in private.

In big round numbers sssume the licensees each sell 100K units at a $10 profit margin after all manufacture and fulfillment costs. $1 M in profit sounds like a lot, but that’s spread around a lot of regional operations with very different infrastructure, national regulations, policy, and procedures. So what’s the over/under on the last of the regional operations accepting orders from people they never accepted orders from previously? That’s a lot of rework or special procedures.

So the questions for the Foundation is this. Do you have a deadline for the distributors to accept orders in all of their geographies? If any region passes that deadline will the parent UK sites accept orders from those regions and waive all export/import fees?

Thanks.

First, thank you for founding this awesome mission. I have followed you religiously. I will try to present a constructive critique. I crunched the numbers and didn’t necessarily *expect* to get one on launch day. With only 10K units available, the odds were not good! However, I did *not* expect to miss out in the manner I did. It was a fiasco. A well-run sellout doesn’t result in cries of “bullshit”, it simply results in disappointed people who queued up TOO LATE, so they know the reason why they missed out. But that’s not what happened. Not at all. It was random and anxiety-causing… which would be no big deal if none of us had an emotional investment in your project… but we DID, because you wanted us to. So you built up expectations and then did the worst thing possible for either a charity or commercial project: you pissed off loyal supporters. It’s still a cool device and excellent mission you have, but I hope you seek logistics advice to prevent sour feelings among the ubernerds.

It is actually goal unfulfilled which is “getting the Pi in the hands of developers” that we need to focus on – take that from a management expert (troll? :)

Liz has commented up thread that the order limit only applies to the first 10,000. With full advantage of 20/20 hindsight, a good policy for the distributors from day 1 would have been to accept all orders with early fulfillment restricted to single orders.

Firstly, congratulations to everyone on the team and a big “Thank you!” for all the time and hard work that has gone in to creating the RPi over the years

I received an email from Farnell UK today inviting me to order the RPi and also claim a free t-shirt (RPi logo and Element 14) too – a computer and a t-shirt for £24.55? Irresistible! My ‘order has been assigned an order number and is currently being processed’ however there’s currently no indication as to when the order’s likely to ship. There is, undoubtedly, a certain joy in the anticipation which I shall savour.

I have some temporary work in a UK school at the moment so hope to use the RPi after SATs when Year 6 traditionally go,,, BonKErs. It would be great to get them switched on to programming before the summer holidays begin.

Yesterday, a friend of mine with no particular interest in the world of programming began asking me about the RPi for her teenage daughter; I spoke positively about its potential, of course. The publicity surrounding the launch seems to have gone beyond the programming community which is certainly promising.

Farnell will send you another email (probably overnight) telling you an approx delivery date. I got my pre-order in on 1st March and am looking at delivery from the end of April at the earliest 8-(

Thanks for letting me know, Richard, the wait rather suits me since it will allow me the time to put something together for the summer term (assuming the job is extended).

When going to the manufactures pages I still do not see a place to at least place an order (no matter how long I have to wait for the PI). Can they please at least take order to be delivered later on?

You need to “register” then they will send you an email inviting you to order and at that point you can pre-order one and hope that you get one before June. Rush to the site now otherwise it will be July or August before you can get one.

Will raspi be available for private persons?

I life in Germany and farnell normally does not sell to private persons. Apart from that a friend of mine still tried to order one. But there was no distributer in Germany for the board. He tried to order it from the Russian distributer, but the shipping was over 20€.

And yesterday I got an email from RS, that they do not sell to private persons :(

So, will you ever make raspi available for private persons? Or do we have to wait for resellers?

One stupid idea:
Why don’t you also ask kaidomain.com, dealextreme.com, seeedstudio.com or whatever to sell the raspi board?
I think many of us doesn’t mind 2 weeks shipping and additional 5€ for taxes. It is still better then no raspi.

I hate to just be one of those “+1” people, but the “Spam Free WordPress” plugin is really killing me.

I know that you’re still having site/db troubles because I’m getting intermittent ‘db unavailable’ errors when I try to access articles on the site, but it’s very frustrating to have to keep on clicking around and copying my comment (composed in an external text editor now) and the passwords into the form.

If there’s anything that us grunts can do to help out, even if it’s “do X so that we can do Y,” please let us know. I think we’d all like to see you guys succeed, and rough edges might be pushing some people away and leaving a bad first impression that will take more work to overcome in the future.

I don’t know stats on how many people are trying to View vs. Post replies, but would it be helpful to put in some static pages so that db hits would only be the active posters + 1 (cache refresh)?

The Spam blockers been giving me grief too.

Still can’t complete and order for one in Norway, even though both RS and Farnell have Norwegian distributors. Their export sites in the UK won’t deliver to Norway either. I’ve still got one in my shopping basket at Farnell Norway after putting it there early on launch day after failing the same at Farnell Export. At Farnell Export, which was the only option on the Farnell site linked to from the RaspPi site on Thurdsday morning, I managed to get one in my shopping basket early but after going through all the registration and entering credit card and delivery details, I got a “Sorry, we cannot deliver to Norway”. Discovered the Norwegian site later that morning thanks to a work colleague, but there it wasn’t possible to register as a user without a VAT number so couldn’t even place a pre-order. Very frustrating waste of over two hours, and still haven’t a clue how to order one from here! The Norwegian RS site has the same business terms with “we only deal with VAT-registered businesses” and requiring a VAT number to register. I believe that the same terms apply in Denmark and Sweden too. Was really looking forward to the RaspPi but so far it’s been an expensive waste of time… Still want one though :)

Eben, Liz, sorry, but your so called “launch” was a big disappointment. I registered my interest for a board at RS UK, Farnell UK and Farnell-Newark USA, but so far I did not hear back from them, besides the fact that all registration forms have no mention to Brazil in their list of countries. Farnell has a Brazilian office, but they have no information about the Pi.

That’s what I’ve got so far, after all the promises made before the “launch”. So far, the Pi is a lie. It’s just vaporware, the world’s greatest $25/$35 computer you can’t have.

You can have one. It’ll just take a few weeks. Not vapourware. Sorry that you feel that way, but many 10 of thousands of people wanted one of the first 10k batch. There were bound to disappointed people 19 out of 20 at least. Just because you didn’t get one, does that give you the right to call it vapourware? Or is that just you being a bit of a cry baby? Most other people who didn’t get one didn’t feel the need to say anything at all.

Surely, splitting the email list of 100,000 supporters to Farnell and RS based on countries served isn’t that hard. (We are seeing logistics problems now because we allowed it to happen.)

I don’t want to accuse you but I’m disappointed with the launch.

I know that’s very hard to handle that much traffic on servers, especally when it’s just a little peak and far from “normal” and I was prepared that the server will crash and I won’t get a RaspberryPi from the initial batch but nevertheless it was disappointing.

I think it is a logical step for you to work with partners and so on but it looks like you didn’t talked enough with them or made the contracts right. There just was a total mess at the time of launch, espacally when not only cause of the partners.
What I especally don’t like is the fact that it seems like you didn’t talked with the partners about who can buy one and didn’t set them the limit to the initial price you always rely on. Yes these companies seem to ship worldwide but you didn’t looked for the terms they ship in other countries and which price they want to take for it there.

It’s great that you want to clear everything and it is necessary that you do this but this doesn’t change anything that the launch totally failed.
I live in Germany and I didn’t had any chance to get one, not just cause of the servers but also cause of the mess that non-companies can’t buy one. If I just wouldn’t be fast enough, no matter if the server were too slow or I just didn’t managed to get up that early I just would be a little bit disappointed and I was prepared for but the fact that I didn’t even had a chance eventhough you always said that everybody should have a chance (and the false information that the “register interrest” page would be wrong) just makes me feel mad in ways…

Please come back next week – we’re sorting out the “business only” problem and should be able to tell you what’s happening for Germany and other territories where it’s currently saying that very soon.

Till today it seems the private/company issue regarding Germany is not solved. I “registered my interest” as soon as it was possible and heard nothing till today.
Could somebody official post where and whether at all you can order as a private person from Germany? Please?

Cry baby – well put.The more I read of people who are pissed off that they did not get one at launch reminds me of the queues of people outside Apple stores on launch day who simply MUST have one that day. I was hoping that the RPi had attracted a better crowd. I have been following the RPi for a long time and tried for a solid 2 hours to get one – all to no avail. No problem – I’ll wait 4-6 weeks to get one. I’ll just spend more time running it virtually and getting my hardware in place..The Foundation and its members are doing an excellent job and we should all be appreciative of this…..BTW going with RS and Farnell certainly is the most sensible approach on many levels, shame most people cannot see this.

Firstly I would like to add my congratulations on the launch of the Raspi.
It is the culmination of a vision and a huge amount of hard work by all concerned. Whilst there were problems I think it was ultimately a good idea to licence production and supply to 2 (mostly) pretty good and reputable suppliers

I guess you couldn’t have imagined in your wildest dreams the interest that this would ultimately generate.

I have followed with interest the progress towards the launch for the last 3 months or so since being made aware of the Raspi project by a friend.

My background is in electronics manufacturing and l too have been alarmed at the lack of basic understanding that many who purport to be technically capable have.

Certainly among my contemporaries who learnt about computers in the late 70s and 80s I think we all had hands-on programming and or electronic construction experience, many with the Sinclair, BBC or Commodore micros of the era.

I think the Raspi will definitely play a large part in enthusing today’s future designers, engineers and programmers, both here in the UK and around the world. I am sure that it will be put to uses that no-one will have thus far dreamt of.

Judging by the enormous amount of work by others towards providing OS releases, porting applications to run on the Raspi and the hardware expansion board etc – and this all before it was even launched – has to be a good omen for the future. I am sure it will go from strength to strength.

For what it’s worth, this was my experience of trying to order a Raspi on launch day.

I didn’t receive an email from the mailing list, but I visited the Raspi site quite late the day before and spotted the “set you alarms” post – which I did.

I managed to get to the Raspi static page at about 6.05 and at about 6.15 managed to get onto the RS “express interest” page and after entering details got the “confirmation” message. I phoned RS at about 9.15 and the person I spoke to didn’t know anything about the availability of the Raspi but had received dozens of similar calls before mine!

I have still not received any further communication from RS.

After much trying I did eventually manage to get onto the Farnell site at about 11am and (having found the part number on Twitter) I was able to find and put a Raspi into my basket but then the site crashed when I tried to “checkout”!

I gave up after a few more attempts but returned at around 1pm to discover the Farnell site was accessible again but was now only showing an “express interest” page. At this point I noticed that the Raspi was still in my basket and was able to checkout! Woo hoo! I was sent a confirmation email with a delivery date of w/c 16th April. The price I was charged (and is still showing on the order on my account) was £26.55 + VAT with no shipping charge but when I got the confirmation email it said it was £24.55 + VAT.

I rang Farnell and was assured that the lower price was correct and was what was showing on their system for my order despite the fact that my online account says otherwise! Ah well – I’ll have to wait and see what happens when they actually fulfil the order!

Best wishes for the future with the project and hope you have a good relaxing holiday booked for later in the year. I imagine you will need it!

What I don’t quite get is the secret you made about the launch. If you just announced (via the blog, without a specific time where all have to set their alarms on) that RS and Farnell will built the boards, there would have been no DDoS and there wouldn’t have been so many people disappointed about not getting a board in first place. I don’t know since when you had that plan with the distributors but it must’ve been at least a week to get them this far. So honest communication looks different to me.

I registered with RS though I was quite sure they don’t sheip to private customers in germany. So all I could do was to hope there.
At farnell (I reached their page at about 5:59) I saw the product and the price. As I wanted to put it into the basket it said it was unable to calculate a price. Quite disappointing.
Again: no criticism about letting Farnell and RS build the boards. Just about the way you marketed the launch and the hype around it.

We weren’t able to publicise it until it happened for contractual reasons. I’ve said it several times in this three, but there are so many posts I’d not be surprised if you’ve not spotted it: we’re working to fix the “business only” thing, and it should not be happening after the start of next week.

Seems like RS and Fernell are to blame themselves if they make contracts that really crash their site.
Yes, I read about fixing that “no orders for non-business” and I talked with some RS and Farnell-guys at the “embedded world 2012” trade fair in Nuremberg just feb, 29th. Shouldn’t be a problem but it was just that at the time of launch it was not clear at all.
Conlusion: Good decision from your side, bad contracts and just a bit more patience needed :D
And I’m still amazed you keep reading & replying to comments :)

JamesH, I have no problem with the fact that I was not one of the first 10k lucky ones. However, you folks said that the Pi would be available for worldwide shipping, what it is not right now. Even if I had been able to place a pre-order, none of your resellers are taking orders for several parts of the world, Brazil included. Your distribution deals were not closed overnight and I assume you knew that it would not be so simple to order a board outside Europe and North America.

I can understand the high demand for the Pi and I was expecting that sales would be on a “first come, first served” basis, but at this moment it seems more like “don’t even come, you won’t be served any time soon”.

Nope, I believe the contract is for worldwide sales, so there are basically some teething problems which should be sorted by next week.

I believe the RS deal was closed overnight btw….

http://elinux.org/RPi_Buying_Guide#Brazil

Have you actually *tried* the FarnellNewark (the only local option in that list) ??
They don’t even have it listed !!

I just want to say if you think all people who want the Rpi already preorder, wrong.
I know a lot people including me, who wait for a release to buy.
i hate pre-order too, you pay for something or order something you don’t realy know the price and stuff.

Glad to see your site back to normal and gratzs on starting to sell the Raspberry Pi – really looking forwards to getting my hands on one (I did get up early on the start and quit trying after 30 minutes)

Very smart move on licensing the production to bigger companies … was a bit shocked when I read it was Farnell and RS (I am from germany and both companies did not sell to private persons on principle) – as a side effect of your deal with them I have some hope that this may change now :)

Do not let those disappointed persons who did not get to order one get to you and ruin your sense of accomplishment on this – in a few weeks / month everyone will look back on chaos day and laugh about it ;)

Totally confused about this.
So, 06:30 everything’s dead, ok fair enough…
By the time Farnell comes up, they’re sold out
RS says “we’re shipping at the end of the week, please register interest”, so I do, no email, nada, not in my spam box nothing.
Raspberry pi shop dead, for what I can see has pretty much been solid since 06:01 AM on the 1st….
So, where did the first 10,000 go?

How many days/weeks will I have to wait for RS to pull their finger out?

So, whilst you guys have a great product and I hope one day to buy one, I’m really left feeling that the launch could’ve been handled better and with a slightly sour taste of raspberry in my mouth.

As and when RS can be bothered to get in touch, I’ll get one, In the meantime I’m sorr to say, I’m going to start looking at other similar products like the BeagleBoard/PandaBoard and so on.

I look forward to seeing the Raspberry-pi being available without the sour taste.

If you go to Farnell today, you should be able to order. If you go to RS and register an interest, you should be able to order. We both missed the first batch but Farnell are taking orders for delivery 30 days away.

For me, the whole thing was summed up by one tweet:

“as frustrated as people are, at least the news wasn’t: “$25 ARM computer released, no one was interested.”.

And how they were interested! Congratulations guys, by any measure this launch was a spectacular success, and there are many many of us who are *hugely* excited about what the PI is going to mean for interest in computing and programming. Thanks to you all, you deserve medals and more.

Hope all this goes well :)

But you guys need to clarify some things whit the two resellers.
The pice+tax+shipping. And confirm they sell to everybody, not just businesses.

We are working on exactly that! I’ll be speaking to them on Monday (and thank you all for your emails and what you have posted here; they’re very useful for explaining what we’re talking about), and should have an update for you soon.

I’m hoping since Liz is a food blogger in her other life that she can help me with a very important problem. I plan on celebrating the arrival of my Raspberry by having a pint (or 6) at my local tavern which carries 2 British beers on tap, Fuller’s ESB and Newcastle Brown. So my question is, which will go better with Pi?

Yes, must take care of the important things first. I haven’t had Fuller’s ESB, but I heartily recommend Newcastle; it goes nicely with pie, Pi and by itself. I first tried it in southern China in the 90’s. Met an Ozzie guy who suggested it and the two of us and, in a very Pi-launch-like way, quickly depleted the hotel restaurant’s entire stock.

Several weeks ago I signed up on the email list – never got a single one. At first thought the registration didnt work, tried it again, and it said I was already registered. Checked spam folders, nothing there either.

I was able to get an order in, though the $20 shipping to US was a bit of a surprise for something so small. Cant wait for it to arrive….

Congratulations on shipping and surviving thousands of hungry geeks!

Besides, I guess both farnell and rs now knows that they should make some pi’s.

Oh.. and I’ll ship some local norwegian brew as soon as I get to order mine. my precious! *wink wink*

I also got up at 7 in the morning but only managed to register my interest. I just want to congratulate the whole Raspi team for making this once thought vaporware back into liquid state.
I think everyone should go easy on Eben, Liz and others.

Hi Folks, long time listener, first time calller. Great launch day… I have to add that I’m slightly miffed that it appears that my “register interest” has been lost like so many others, but hey ho, I can wait. What really has tickled me is that the launch news see,s to have been bigger than all the rumoors about the impending launch/news about the iPad3! £22 cicuit board creates more international chatter than a £500 fancy schmancy Apple product… good on you guys.

Forget about all the gnashing of teeth, and angry rants and enjoy your moment, and I hope you have many more. As someone else said, I hope that by the time I actually get to order one, I’ll have learnt somethign from Code Academy and will be in a position to teach my 2-3 year old how to code and tinker with the tech.

Cheers
Alun

You must be feeling as if you’ve been run over by a bulldozer. But it seems like it was a bulldozer made of gold :-)

I left my business card at the Farnell booth at the “embedded world”. We’ll see what happens. It was slightly crowded there :-) I know about at least 3 sales I will be partly responsible for… likely more. It’s the kind of thing you want to own more than one piece, isn’t it?

why did you launch with a small number of rasberry pi knowing it would have huge demand worldwide..people will be sick of waiting and to turn to something else

Funding wasn’t available to make any more than 10k. However, production is ramping very fast. And since there are no alternatives at the moment, there isn’t much to turn to.

The funding to which JamesH refers was predominantly raised by the trustees by mortgaging their homes. It is next to impossible for start-up charities to raise working capital by other means and really is a case of the trustees putting their money where their mouth is.

Mistake? Farnell Germany refuses to sell to non-businesses since ages. That is not an accident, they do this fully intentionally, cycling through a rather boring list of excuses. Made-up legal reasons are their most common excuse. One can’t even contact their live chat to ask a question without providing company information. The thing is, they just hate hobbyists and do everything to keep them away.

I am not surprised that people already get cancellation notifications on the ground they don’t run a business, or requests to prove they run a business. This is their normal behavior. Many hobbyists have experienced it over the years.

The foundation couldn’t have picked a worse distributor. I seriously hope there is clear and strong language in the contract and the foundation manages to enforce it.

Can I suggest you go and have another look? :)

All I can do is to express an interest. I can’t do the litmus test, ordering from them, because there is nothing to order now. And ordering is a completely different ballgame than expressing an interest. Live chat still requires company details.
Whatever contract you have, the local branches won’t give up without putting up a good fight, whatever the guys and girls at their headquarters tell you. They have treated hobbyists like pond scum for ages, they won’t break that habit easily.
I for one have made a decision. I don’t want to deal with these unfriendly companies at all, even if they finally condescendingly grant a one-time exemption. They aren’t worth my money. Time to move on.

These guys (RS and Farnell) really don’t like dealing with consumers (maybe because of the support calls?)

I suspect they *will* make it hard for hobbyists to place orders, even after making the “company” field optional.

I do have a VAT number. I hope that’s enough to keep them happy (its the ones that insist on communicating by fax that trip me up.)

They have a contract to supply to consumers.

Did I get one of the first batch? – Of course not!
Did I expect to get one? – Of course not!
Can I say that I have been taking part in a day that made computer history? – YES I CAN!

The only saddening thing is the apparently very large number of people who have never learnt as children to control their temper if they don’t get instant gratification, and make life for volunteers way harder than it should be. Folks – the very fact that we did not get a Pi right now and have been DDOSing two large multinational companies for hours instead, proves that we just witnessed the birth of a completely new kind of device, a computer accessible to everyone on the planet. That does not fill me with disappointment, but with fascination and awe. Cheers and congratulations to the Foundation!

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