The first auctions are live!

Little known fact: You can use your local eBay account to log in to other eBay sites. Just log in to ebay.co.uk, then you can bid on the first two Raspberry Pis. The list of all auctions is here: http://cgi6.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=raspberry_pi

Happy New Year from Germany!

LOL! Happy New Year, Liz and thank you VERY MUCH for all the incredible work you’ve done keeping us well informed of your progress to the much-awaited goal.

ps – the Mayans were very good at arithmetic and somewhat less good with predictions…

lol the price is skyrocketing, guess i’ll wait for the final boards :D

Mayans were wrong? About what? The roll over in the cycle of their calender? I don’t it. They were spot on.

If you mean the sort of gibbering idiots who think that neutrino’s might mutate… that’s a different matter… they are wrong!

You already wrote what I think about Mayans calendar and ‘2012’ idiots…

Auctions: That’s overwhelming, isn’t it? Good luck for the foundation on that. But I’ll wait a few weeks to get my bunch of boards :-)

Re: Mayans – here’s your answer for a good laugh:
http://youtu.be/kcc_KAhwpa0
I love that there is a tl;dr short version of it too:
http://youtu.be/Pyv1A8StJSs
Priceless… :)

Thanks for these videos. They could have helped me last spring consoling my daughter after she has heard of ‘2012’…

I love the Mayan thing.

Normal person – the calendar runs out, so we’ll get the new year’s calendar.
Rabid loonie – the calendar runs out, so the world is going to end.

Just back away from any “world is ending” people, avoiding eye contact as much as possible.

wow – look at those numbers. Makes you wonder what #01 and #02 will go for.
Congrats on a great idea to get the foundation some cashflow.
I’m really looking fwd to a slightly cheaper :-) unit when you begin manufacture.

Happy new Year to every one out there!

Hi. Everyone :)

I have a big interest on this beautiful machine for educational purposes here in the Philippines for college thesis. When are we expecting like getting these boards from this site? :) Like a specific date?

Thanks :)

The Foundation hopes that the Raspberry Pi will go on sale to hobbyists in January/February, with a ‘schools’ release planned for June/July time. First versions of the manual (being written by members of the http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ working group) will hopefully be available in March.

What do you mean by a schools release? Just curious
@Jerome i’m also exited about the release of the pi, and i think it’s a good choice for a thesis because of the flexibility of it, also small enough for a case to withstand our country’s conditions

i’m looking forward to get my hands on it like 10pcs. dang! hopefully it gets here in time by feb :|

More than £2000 for both RPis already! =)
Happy New Year from Russia! :)

I hope so, as it would be a great start to the R-Pi year. Personally I wouldn’t count on the cash until it was my bank as I have had fake bidders trying to scare off legitimate bids, so don’t let the high bids put you off bidding.

I was top bidder for about 30 seconds. That’s kind of a win right?

Well at least rich people get to maybe own one the year they were supposed to come out.

Happy new year to everyone at the foundation, (and everyone else come to think of it), sad the price is out of my range so fast but real happy when you know where the funding’s going.

Ivo

Good luck with the auction. But I can see that you guys don’t need it (the luck that is :D )

Happy new year to all especially the Raspberry PI team that have worked to get this out

Happy new year! Sure glad there are geeks with money to burn out there, because the units on eBay have gotten over 2,000 dollars each.

Will #1 have the power to control the other 9? We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious!!

Great work guys. It must be very satisfying to see you work finally come to fruition. Now that the boards are starting to ship out, I’m kind of curious what kinds of activities we’ll be seeing from the foundation other than hardware. Congratulations, and happy new year.

Well, I was about to top mu budget and offer 200EUR, but it seems that I am a total looser comparing the current bid volume :(
And this is not even the #1, just #10 and #9.
Congratulation on the excelent idea!

“failed miserably to tick one of the eBay interface’s many hundreds of boxes”
^ THIS

A very Happy New Year to you all.

I am kind of surprised that Eben is surprised. You guys probably didn’t get that ‘the community’ waits eagerly to get a grip on the Raspis because of very different reasons.
While your major reason for development is education a lot of people see computing power everywhere. This seems like a great step ahead into the era of “smart things”. Of course PICs and microcontrollers could already do that but they are not as open to everybody as the Raspi.
With the Raspi you can create great solutions within a ‘standard’ and well known environment. This is a tool enabling creative people, like programmers always are, to do many more things than before.
The Raspi is the first tool that will be available to the masses because of the price. We have already understood the Raspi and while we all probably don’t want it for the same reasons (education of the youth) we still see all the possibilities and have solutions in mind.
That’s why we want to support the development. Some of us have the financial power, they are the ones bidding now, some have the power of mind to create the ideas. Happy one who has both.

We all LOVE what you do if you ask we’ll support you in every possible way.

You are the heroes of your adulthood :-)

Bye
Lars

+1

Yeah, what he said! +1

Hmm… and when can we “cheap” people buy one?

I would also like to know that…

When the cheap ones are in production.

:-)

Ha, Mayans. It’s a joke.

I have no problems waiting a while for a good product with the bugs worked out but maybe that’s because it’s the summer break here in South Africa. We have plenty of low-income communities where we could deploy these, and I already have the interest of a pretty sharp student who would like to pair some with a home-brewed wireless mesh network.

I staggered in from a New Years Eve celebration to find that one of the boards had topped £1300 and the other £750. And I was going to make a bid myself, but not at those levels!

*sigh*

But, good luck to the bidders on all the boards as they become available. To be honest, if I won one, it wouldn’t get used at all. It and the documentation would end up in a display case on my wall.

Then again, it could still function as a server….

:-)

pew 1.4K£ so far, pretty nice auction !
i’m wondering how much will go the n°1… :)

Happy New Year Raspi !

Probably astronomical. Bragging rights, you know- and those never come cheap. I happen to have one of the first 200 ZX80 trial market kits Sir Clive sold to the States… I’d love to have that sort of bragging rights for this machine… ;)

[…] "CRITEO-300×250", 300, 250); 1 meneos Pujan más de 1000 libras por la primera Raspberry Pi que sale a subasta, ¿hasta donde llegará? [I… http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/489  por isola009 hace […]

Whoa, that’s obscure Apple/Nintendo prototype level of interest! Enjoy, whoever wins.

Happy New Year!

P.S I think you deserve congrats for even attempting ebaying on New Years day Liz!

Bizarre.
The boards are going for thousands, yet they are touted as a $25 computer. I’ll wait, I think… ;)

It’s the 35$ computer they’re auctioning, just saying :P

makes lots of difference when you’re bidding >2000$ !

It’s not all that bizzare to me. The raspberry pi foundation seems to have shunned donations from individuals so-far so these auctions are the first opertunity for individuals to dontate to the foundation.

It’s called bragging rights. Never comes cheaply. The people bidding this up are geeks aiming to own a piece of history.

Humble suggestion – as the first boards are already auctioned, maybe it’s time to put the images of OS onto the site somewhere.
I know I most probably won’t be within the winners of the auction, anyhow I think it’s a good idea.

We can’t yet, because we’re still thrashing through the legals. Patience, young padawan!

Just out of curiosity, what are the legal requirements to distribute free software? Something to do with proprietary standards like FAT and mp3?

Liz is talking about “The Blob” and the related libs.

Thanks

Calling me young increased my morale by signifficant amount :)

That is the beauty of a copyrighted binary blob. If they wanted, they could sink the entire raspberry pi project…. :-/

Well, I guess you guys already have some type of contract, and broadcom isn’t EVIL, so it is only a matter of time and unproductive legal effort…

I suggest to refrain from commenting on things you know nothing about. The legal issue here is not with the Broadcom SoC or its blob, it’s with the Linux side of things.

I suppose Broadcom could sink the project if they wanted by not supplying chips at the price negotiated but that owuldbe breach of contract. Not sure why they would do that though, given it’s an income stream that is bringing in a lot of good press.

Ok, sorry. I will wait for the update on the linux stuff. Psergiu comment made me think that the problem was licensing the blob.

Yeah, by (rightfully) using trade secrets, patents, and related laws, Broadcom is the sole suplier of their SoC. But then, there are contracts that offers a reasonable protection against supply issues, if their interests or situation ever changes. The world isn’t perfect…

That said, I very much appreciate the work of the Raspberry Pi Fundation till now. I hope we see those boards in the wild soon!

Nothing at all to do with Broadcom; it’s the Linux stuff we’re negotiating at the moment. Paranoia’s a very unattractive trait, you know.

It depends. If there are now say just five people willing to pay > #500 they will drive up the price above what everybody else wants to pay. So prices could drop off after a few of these are sold.
On the other hand, some people might actually be willing to spend say > #2000 but expect the above scenario, so hope to be able to keep some money in their pocket by no longer bidding on this one…..

P.S. The comment system is messed up. It tells me “hit back and enter the password”, while I HAD entered the password, and my back button was grayed out.

How do we know that this company is legit? “Oh, let’s hype a $25 dollar pc, then sodder some used parts together and sell them on ebay! lol..just kidding..i can’t wait to get my $35 dollar youtube streamer.

I bade 800+ GBP onto this prototype board, and after noone was overbidding me for over an hour, I started to look seriously what could I do with the board if Im the winner guy.

Apart from some demo videos, I have not found any drivers for the board, so I hope Fedora-arm (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM) could run on this board, and I could end up at least into the command line interface, but maybe even for command line interface graphical drivers are required (anyone could confirm?), is there any vesa drivers for arm systems to at least boot up without graphics driver?

I just realised Im not really into ARM world, therefore Im not the right candidate for being a guinea pig.

So I completely turned upside down, since Im outbidded, Im not even sure I will be in the first buyers. Maybe it makes more since just to wait at least half year to let the software side mature. And wait until start to show up some useful help documents on the internet.

The trick here is the 35USD, I dont really mind risking 35USD, while risking 800GBP still needs to be thought through.

Best,
Laszlo

i’ll wait for the final board.. i’m still a student with low weekly allowance! u.U

How can I see on the boards for auction that a particular board is e.g. #10? Is the number engraved into the board? Are you sure #10 is in fact #10 and not #8 as you have accidentally mixed the boards when taking from factory?

Yes, we’re sure. The numbers are hard-coded into write-only memory as well as written on the boards themselves.

Can you please tell me more about the “write-only” memory? To build some sort of copy protection for automation systems one could use this serial number. How can one access this data?

A little known feature of the BCM2835 is that it contains an unlimited amount of write-only memory.

We don’t let you get away with any slips here, even the morning after a New Year’s party.

Ha! I mean *READ* only, of course. Sorry; I’m still a little tender after all the partying last night!

I think, perhaps, the term you’re looking for is “One-Time Programmable” (OTP) memory.

Would not like to sound too bitch, but should it not be write-once-read-many memory?
Otherwise it’s nice you can write to it, but since you cannot read it…

OK, next time I will refresh the page before commenting :(
Sorry for that.

According to Wikipedia, Apple I computers can sell for about $15,000, although one with lot of unique documents went for $213,600 in Nov., 2010.

I’m thinking that a typical bidder isn’t just planning on the charitable contribution, but on the potential for a valuable piece of future computer history.

“a valuable piece of future computer history.”

Probably you got the real idea. A collectionist bidding for the #10 or #9 device would be pleased to have “the first comercial RasPi” in the history.

That’s the sum of it. Bragging rights never come cheaply except by dumb luck.

like when i order the $35 version and i get number 11

I am glad to see that Raspberry Pi is nearing a retail situation. I had some faint thoughts of bidding then I saw the high bid (as of noon California time on Jan 1, 2012 of 1361 pounds. I hastily decided I would not bid.
But, I wanted to ask if you would consider donating one to the Smithsonian Institute in the United States. I will be happy to pay the $25.00 should you choose to do so. I don’t know if it will prove worthy, but I suspect it will. After all, how many people introduce the computer to the masses. I suspect the United Kingdom has a similar institute and I think they should get one also, but I will let someone from there pay for it. Keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to have one to play with.
And this from a man who built his own S-100 Bus Z-80 computer in the 1970’s or 1980’s and modified the BIOS to work with his CPU board.
Thank you,
Homer Hazel

I don’t think the museum should get one from the first consumer batch instead of the beta board.
Anyhow, I also feel this will be a part of the history someday.

I don’t understand your comment, it looks like a double negative to me. Anyway, I don’t want the Smithsonian to get a beta board, I want them to get a production board. I want them to have the exact same thing the masses have.

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Something that I don’t understand: You say that you’re adequately funded so you don’t want to take pre-orders. But if you are adequately funded, why are you doing these auctions?

We have a small number of boards we can sell at the moment, as a by-product of getting the product ready for mass manufacture. We want to allocate them to people. We don’t want to do it via a lottery, and we’re aware that these first ones are actually pretty valuable, so in grand capitalist style, we’re selling them in terms of people’s ability to pay.

I know it’s not something everybody here understands, but we would genuinely feel uncomfortable selling something we do not have. There’s that, and the fact that part of the calculation about pre-orders has to do with weighing the value of the money we’d receive early and the value of the time we’d have to spend administering pre-orders, which could get pretty hairy pretty quickly given the level of interest. Pre-orders don’t raise *extra* capital, like auctioning off these pre-release boards does. They just raise the same amount earlier, with some added hassle. We felt that the greatest value was in spending our time doing other things, like actually getting the boards ready for manufacture.

Hey Liz, don’t take my comment this negatively. :)
I’m just a little bit jealous of those who can afford to be impatient about the Raspberry Pi. I cannot wait to purchase the final product. :)

Oh – not to worry, I didn’t take it negatively. It is an interesting point!

There is a flipside to almost everything….

If you WOULD take pre-orders you can prepare the pile of boxes with postages, and just drop the finished raspberry-pies in once they come. When done properly, this could speed up getting the first batch out of the door a bit.

But you have probably already considered this and decided against it. I guess we’ll have to respect that decision. Grrr… :-)

They won’t be boxed by us; that gets done at the factory. And they won’t be mailed by us, but by a logistics company, so that’s not a concern. We made that decision because…well, does *your* house have room for 10,000 boxes? How do you feel about sticking 10,000 address labels, 10,000 franking labels and 10,000 customs forms on them, presuming you’ve cleared a bit of space in the living room? ;)

10,000 boxes at 4inches by 3 inches by 1 inch … that’s a 50 inch cube, ‘ll fit in my spare room. Now if I can get some friends to help with the stamps, can I keep a couple for my own use?

All the money raised from this auction will be put straight back into the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and will be used to fund its charitable activities.

Well, are you really surprised of the overhelming interest? Maybe you didn´t know that you finally made it to a frontside story on spiegel.de, which is the most frequented news site in germany. I would be really surprised, if you are not able to sell a minimum of half a million Rasperry Pi`s.

I agree with the opinion of Lars Friedrichs, the biggest market has nothing to do with education in schools.

btw this SPAM blocker, seems to be a bit silly …

Alright! This is very exciting! Can’t wait to get my hands with one of the final models.

Cool. Can’t wait to get my hands on some. Don’t fear the Mayans. The End of the World is just the Beginning. Great things are coming. Although these first 10 boards will probably out of my price range. 8^0

[…] for the world’s first affordable for charity mini-computers began, as announced on the Raspberry Pi blog. For those unfamiliar, Raspberry Pi is a credit card size mini-computer aimed at teaching kids […]

1400£ on eBay! well not for me… I need at 25$!

First, I am not a solicitor, nor do I play one on TV :). Second, I searched the Forums and FAQ but didn’t find anything relevant; if the info is there, blame my poor search technique. I was wondering, as the Foundation is a non-profit, whether the proceeds from the eBay auction would count under US IRS 501(c) rules as a ‘donation to non-profit charity’ and thus would be tax deductible for the value above the list price? Not that I’m going to be bidding at the current levels, but if so, this might encourage others with sufficient discretionary spending to bid more as they’d have a tax write-off after the fact. Whatever can increase the contributions to the Foundation works for me ;>).

We’re a British charity; I’m not at all clear on charity law in other countries, but I would imagine that the place you need to look for that information is eBay, not this site. We’ve jumped through all the hoops that eBay requires to have them identify us legally as a charity (and there are many hoops, some of them flaming); they need to be certain too for legal reasons.

But are you able to get the UK purchases giftaided? Would add another 20% of income from the taxman – and the prices people are paying these are certainly donations!

Glad I came to the party just in time for the release! I’m ready for a slice of PI!

I analysed the bids on ebay, and came to a sad conclusion. Your device after a test run – on the basis of the marketing moves – will cost as much as I understood at least $ 100 instead of the claimed $ 25 – it’s very sad.

No…

I am glad to be able to inform everybody reading here that you have actually misunderstood quite spectacularly, and that the boards will indeed be selling at $25 and $35.

I’m intrigued as to what analysis you did on Ebay bids that means you can predict what price the mass market boards will be sold at. Because that is some serious leaping of imagination there!

That’s all very well, but where’s the famous red wire? :)

Actually I’m not sure the red wire board is being auctioned (perhaps it should be!)

As Eben explains in the video and Liz and Eben explained in another blog post, they were able to find an area of circuit board where the two tracks that need to be joined together actually run next to each other, so for the other beta boards, they scraped a little of the solder resist from each track and created a solder bridge between the two tracks.

Unless you knew what you were looking for, you probably wouldn’t even notice the modification – all in all, a very neat and tidy fix for the beta boards.

That’s a shame! (the not auctioned part, not the neat fix) It would make for a unique collectors item :)

That red wire reminds me of one of my first computers, the Coleco Adam. I purchased it the first weekend it was on sale in 1983. Coleco even had “booth babes” selling them at the Caldor department store in their home town of West Hartford, Connecticut. The rework wires inside that thing were insane. It was obvious that they were a sales & marketing company that just wanted to jump on to the technology bandwagon. They should have just kept improving the ColecoVision video game. They were too busy trying to get things out for a Christmas shopping season, that they skipped quality. Glad that’s not the situation here.

You should sell all raspberries via auction :)

@Poverony woww, you must have real profund knowledge in marketing and statistics. First of all i find your post really offending and creating negative vibes out of 3 reasons. First you offend Liz and the whole team not standing for their word. Second you offend the eagerly waiting community from low-level countries to fear they can’t effort the pi. and third and last you offend all of us with the naive statement to derive a market price based on the bidstructure at ebay from exclusive prototypes. for me the high bid-amounts shows how much the people believe in eben, liz and the whole team. it will be a revolution we are all convinced of. have all a good 2012 !!

About write-only memory…

Not a new kid in the block, had a data sheet published in 1974.

You can read an article about its origin by Robert Pease (RIP), and download the datasheet here:
http://www.national.com/rap/Story/WOMorigin.html

And even an entry at Wikipedia…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_memory

Happy Raspberry Year to all!

:D

WOM is also an architectural feature of HEX in Terry Pratchetts “Hogfather” :-)

Wish i could afford that kinda money, i suspect it will be case manufacturers all bidding on the first ones & true collectors bidding on #01, as long as its going to a good cause that’s the main thing.

Wonder how many of the 100 testers have sold them secrets or knocked up there own cases? this whole project is going to be a roaring success.

Mezo.

[…] chip capable of running Quake III, general sales will begin in around a month according to the Raspberry Pi foundation, meaning early-adopters are willing to pay a hefty mark-up to grab one of the initial dev […]

I will not be bidding (although I’d like to) because I’m on a fixed income and all the crap that goes with that, but please hurry up with your regular production as I’m badly in need of some really inexpensive, but useful toys to play with. I was really bad last year and Santa didn’t bring me what I really wanted (or they were out of Flux Capacitors, whatever)

End of Jan is planned release.

[…] Více informací o běžících aukcích nalzente na oficiálním webu. […]

It’s good watching the bid prices – all out of my league, though. A nice New Year bonus for the Foundation. I don’t know what you were expecting for the boards but I’m fairly sure your hopes are being exceeded.
I’m happy to wait until Jan/Feb for a board. In the meantime I’ve ordered a new motherboard to go with some old parts to make a Linux machine to brush up on. The cheapest M/B I could get still cost more than a complete Raspi.
Also ordered a couple of Class 10 32GB SDs so I can try different OSs when Raspi does arrive.

Glad to see that the betas are getting such strong bids – let’s keep our fingers crossed that these are genuine bids, not just idiots putting in fake bids.

It’s too rich for me to bid on, but an excellent way of raising some funds for cash flow, while giving those with the desire and the resources, a chance to get hold of something rare and unique which I believe could set the PC world on fire :)