As far as I know, they did an initial run of boards in the UK, i've not personally seen any posts where they indicated that they did a limited production run with the supplier they were using the make the large batch, although I'm more than happy to be proved wrong on this. If they did do a mini run and the part was swapped out after, then I'll remove the lunacy tag, they can keep inexperience because they should have had somebody there to ensure the quality of the product.

And even if they are doing it now with farnell, it's a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Hugo placed the blame with Raspberry Pi, I concurred. No matter what the factory did or didn't do, the onus lies soley with raspberry pi to ensure that their end product is built to the BOM and their exact specification.

Like I said, inexperience or lunacy. Take your pick, it's one or the other.

I got focused on the part where they said they ran tests remotely and via "imagination"

Oh dear...

Seems that they've now been told by their distributers that they won't sell them until it's been though EMC testing.

What's bizarre, is that R-PI are claiming that they've been and done it, but they don't know at this point whether it's going to delay anything, my experience of EMC testing is that you know pretty darned quick if something is wrong and you then spend most of your time fitting chokes and makeshift cans to get it inside the curve. My guess is it failed and that they couldn't fix it on site.

Chances are they even use the same test centre as us seeing as they're based in Cambridge.

dB tech FTW! (is that who you use?)

CE is self-cert, so if the testing has all been done, and it passes, then there's no delay. You just print out some CE stickers and be done with it.

To ship immediately to the USA you'd need to go to an FCC certified lab and get FCC testing done there (it takes longer if you do it at a non-cert lab and then send the paperwork off) but again that's just a day.

My guess? They ran compliance testing without all the wires connected, which is an easy way to make something pass but doesn't actually satisfy the requirements (FCC in particular insist that every port is connected - the empeg test setup even had a dot-matrix printer connected to the PC that was connected to the empeg's USB port).

They do appear to be learning how to manufacture electronics very publicly... embarassing.

Yeah, we use dB technology. They're super helpful there - even if the outdoor testing in the middle of winter can be described as "less than fun"!

Yeah, we test our equipment with a everything that could possibly be connected, erm, connected. Even though in a real world situation that would be very unlikely - the more nice pieces of floating cable you add, the more potential antennas you create.

As you point out, it takes very little time to test and certify something. If they've done the tests and are holding back, then it sounds like me that it failed.

Depending on how badly it failed and how easy it is to attenuate the problem frequencies will give them a scale from "oopsie" to "houston, we have a problem".

If they've totally fucked up, then they've just made 10,000 boards with BGA's on that their suppliers won't sell.

Seriously, in the grand scale of things it'd have cost them like a £1000 to spend a day at the test centre with a pre-production prototype and do all the necessary tests. I'd certainly be doing that before pressing the big shiny "go" button on 10,000 boards with BGA's on them.

Can I reinstate my lunacy tag?

I guess if they need to do a v2 with added components they could still bring the v1's back and sell them direct, or via a small distributor.

In fact I know there are hundreds of sponsored Pis reserved for selected developers - they should really get those back ASAP and send them out so the key developers can start messing around!

The problem is that they'd still be selling the product direct to end users, if the Pi was a component part of a another system then the compliance issue would be the problem of the integrator, but that's not the case here.

Raspberry Pi would be liable for all legal issues that subsequently arise because of EMC problems. Trust me, you wouldn't want to be liable.

Their statement on the issue seems pretty clear to me:

But they can't do that, the scale of the product being shipped means that the potential for a complaint is high. They always knew they were shipping 10,000 in the first batch, so to say "we were going to do it later when it's cased" is just either stupid or nieve and stupid.

If they're shipping to end customers without a case, then that's the configuration that should have been tested. It's even likely that they wouldn't have to do a full set of tests on the boxed version later if the unboxed version passed ok.

I just don't get their statement, "we intended to defer". Great, you also intended to ship product in the real world. For a bunch of engineers, they sure seem dumb.

As Hugo says, they're learning the hard way on how to manufacture electronics - or at least making stupid mistakes and doing it the hard way.

I don't know anything about compliance testing, but do eval boards need to be compliance tested? What about all the various Arduinos of the world, are they all tested and certified? I kind of doubt it. What's the difference between them and Raspberry Pi?

It depends how blurry your spectacles are.

I believe that Arduino and such like get away without certification because they're sold as development systems, which is true, without you putting your code on it and connecting up your own electronics (or other boards) it doesn't do anything, it's up to you to provide the magic.

Raspberry pi on the other hand have a full system which I think they'd have a hard time convincing anybody that it's a development board, especially considering that they've gone out of the way to show that it runs a consumer media player distro and hooks up to your tv - and without restricting sale to developers (how do you even do such a thing) and making a huge batch, they really should have realised that this was going to be an issue.

Of course, they could still just say it's a development board and ship them, but I think they put themselves in a very grey area legally, especially if the thing doesnt even pass the radiated emissions tests.

I dunno. the Pi looks very much like a bare development board to me -- very much like any of the Arduinos. I don't know if the latter have ever passed EMI tests, maybe they have?

It looks pretty bare to me too. I can't imagine anyone expecting a real "consumer" device buying one, not yet and certainly not in it's current form.

They've obviously been naive with this product launch, but looking at the product and it's intended market they're probably not the most consumer product savvy people in the world.

I'm sure that this experience will have taught them loads about outsourcing, testing, and QC. If the next batch has similar issues then they probably need to give up.

Like I said, it depends how blurry your spectacles are. You wouldn't class a PC motherboard as a development board would you? I don't see that as being any different to the pi.

Could average joe technophobe do anything with an arduino in 10 minutes? No.

Could same average joe technophobe have his raspberry pi connected up to his tv, running xmbc and playing media in 10 minutes? Yes.

I personally think they'd have a very hard time trying to convince the relevant authoritative bodies that it was only a development board in the case of a problem with emissions.

The sales numbers that are floating around 100k+ and the interest in the media playing says to me that a lot of these units will sit behind a tv and have certainly not been bought by people interested or capable of software development.

(sorry for any errors in this, I'm currently sitting in schipol airport waiting for my flight and using my phone)

No, but there's no one in my circle of friends/acquaintances that's actually bought one. I've got a friend who's been waiting 8 weeks for me to pop over and stick some extra RAM in his PC, despite my reassurances on how easy it is.

Of course I'd expect a MB to be properly tested and certified, but right now I'd only buy the Pi in a case of some kind with a pre-installed OS and some readily available apps. So to me it's substantially more geeky than a MB.

I don't think the same Joe Technophobe would buy the bare board to put behind his TV either. I think he would wait until it came in a case with a PSU, which was what they apparently were waiting for before they did the compliance testing. I don't think he would have more problems plugging in a shield with an LCD and some button, plug in the USB cable and load up a pre-made sketch than he would have with a Pi, where he would have to connect up a PSU, get XBMC onto it somehow and connect it up to the TV...

They apparently had orders for 100,000 of the things.

I guarantee that had they not made a big thing about xmbc and video playback on it that they wouldn't have sold anywhere near that. I frequent some other forums which are non tech related and I was even surprised to see talk of the pi. Nobody mentioning development, just people excited about running xbmc.

As for getting the os on it, xmbc will have a single click tool for creating the sd card for it. Put sd card in, connect hdmi & power, job done.

According to this article:

Currently, rival devices such as the Beagleboard can be delivered to UK customers without undergoing the CE testing.

I have no idea what a beagleboard is and agree that they should have had it tested and certified regardless, but it wasn't a black and white case as far as the Pi team were concerned.

The Beagleboard I fished out of the returns bin at the Farnell trade counter in Leeds has got a CE mark, but no FCC mark.

Here's the latest quote from the guy who designed the Pi.



You can read his whole post here:

http://www.element14.com/community/peopl...-and-compliance