Inside the Raspberry Pi Factory 120
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a photo walk through of how Raspberry Pi boards are made at a Sony factory in South Wales, UK. The factory says that the multiple automated and manual checks have meant that only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped with defects."
Glad they're reliable (Score:2)
only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped with defects
1 of 5 of the boards I ordered recently was defective. It has the "can't keep the USB running" error. They were the 'Made in China" versions. Hopefully the Sony-made ones will be more reliable.
Re:Glad they're reliable (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's only one of five, it would be extremely interesting for RPi team they are actively working on solutions for usb problems (there were several found and some corrected already). Could you help them and write your experiences in this thread [raspberrypi.org]?
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About 30 boards (ordered from European Farnell, IIRC all made in UK) went through my hands in the past few months; I had no problem with any of them.
I would be the first to point out some dubious design choices and other not-so-good things about the Raspberry Pi, but myself I can't complain about defective items at all.
Re:Glad they're reliable (Score:5, Insightful)
While I can understand why they went with a cheap, standard, connector(rather than yet-another-goddam-slightly-different-barrel-plug), I suspect that the rPI support guys are cursing the day that they chose a USB socket as a DC-in jack.
To put it politely, the quality of USB chargers and powered hub wall warts is excitingly variable. If you are trying to run an ARM SoC, a USB ethernet controller, and possibly a couple of other downstream devices, all with just a +5 rail of potentially erratic specs, that isn't good for reliability. By going with the USB socket, they opened the field to every last dollar-store iCharger knockoff and its creative interpretation of what +5vDC looks like...
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Yes. I think key in my good experience with RPi is that for all of them, I'm using the same type of uUSB PSU. It is actually a rather cheap OEM part, but it works reliably and I think many of the experienced problems with RPi stem from bad PSUs.
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" the quality of USB chargers and powered hub wall warts is excitingly variable"
I have had some exciting times with USB wall warts... melting is not too exciting but when you get flames it can get very exciting.
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Dave Jones' "EEVBlog" recently did a teardown of a couple knockoff AppleUSB chargers. Some pretty scary cruft inside, for sure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE [youtube.com]
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http://www.arcfn.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html [arcfn.com]
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Really to test properly a multimeter alone is not enough, you need a known test load.
In other words hack together a board with a micro USB socket and a 5 ohm 7-10W resistor (technically 5W would be enough but I like to leave some margin). Then plug your PSU into it and measure the voltage. If you have a scope you can also measure to see if there is any significant ripple.
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The problem is quite real but you're mad to think that this is exclusively an issue of the USB connector. Barrel plugs come in about 6 different standard sizes with no standard voltage for a certain plug.
By going with a common DC jack you not only open yourself to the same shoddy Chinese powersupplies as the USB chargers (my favourite of which was a 5V 2A charger without a heatsink which nearly melted supplying only 600mA) but you also open yourself to the risk of people plugging the wrong voltage charger i
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Oh, don't get me wrong, I think that the USB connector is definitely the best of the (mostly bad) options. The bottom of the market in wall warts is fairly dreadful no matter what shape the connector is, and even people without access to a geek's-giant-bin-of-parts at least probably have a few of this flavor.
The one really unfortunate side effect(although probably unavoidable at this price point) of going with USB is that it means +5v input(maybe a hair higher, quite often lower if the supply is drooping) f
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Actually when you think about it they didn't get this quite as wrong as you think.
The vast majority of USB wall warts on the market are designed to deliver a far higher load than any USB socket. It's the whole quick charging issue. The USB2.0 spec does not allow drawing 1A from the socket, a usb wallwart does, and this combined with some load sensing circuitry is precisely why phones charge much faster when plugged into the wall. The most common USB wallwart variety is in excess of 800mA, and very few peopl
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Agreed. I picked up a microUSB "travel charger" for m
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One of the two boards I ordered was DOA. The little red light would come on but nothing else... no boot, etc.
The other board worked fine with the same memory card, cables, power supply, etc. so it had to be the board.
Nice to know that I had the only 1 in 150,000... maybe I should try the lottery.
Cases? (Score:1)
Since when do they ship in a clear plastic case as in the article?
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raspberry for chinese boards (Score:1)
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Get a DC Volt-meter.
While RPi is running and accesing USB devices measure between TP1 & TP2 points on the board.
If the voltage is near or below 4.75V or near or above 5.25V the fault resides in your power supply.
The ideal powersupply should be a clean 5.1V one 1A or more - as you have some voltage drops over the polyfuses.
I have two "original" 256Mb RPis Made In China and all the common USB issues i had were fixed with better power supplies (old 5V,2A PSP power brick & 5V,3A DC 7~24V to 5V step-down
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Only 2 so far from the Sony factory in the UK, none of the boards made in China count towards that total.
Better "inside" view (Score:5, Informative)
I think this: post from Pi [raspberrypi.org] is a better "walk-through", as it includes descriptions as well as pictures.
But, that's just me.
Some earlier pictures of the Factory... (Score:2)
Can be found here [arcade-museum.com]:
They've still got supply issues in the UK (Score:1)
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Now start making the Model B's there. (Score:5, Informative)
Because in my experience, the yield from the chinese Model B factory is 50%.
My first RPi is currently tied up in a work project, so I ordered another model B from Newark. It came in and I fired it up yesterday, no LEDs or any signs of life. Dead.
Then I noticed the main BGA in the center of the card looked a bit askew, looked closer and noticed the BCM2835 was missing. The Samsung DRAM that ordinary sits on top of the '2835 was soldered straight onto the PCB. I understand the part shooter fucking up once in a while and missing a chip, but the board shouldn't have made it out of the factory.
C'mon. I'd rather pay a few extra bucks for something that's most likely going to work, than do what I'm doing now and spending even more bucks mailing the fucking thing back, and crossing my fingers that the replacement works too...
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Sony factory (Score:2)
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Manufactured by Sony, but not designed or modified by Sony.
I'm ok with that, I would actually prefer a Sony model vs the Chinese manufactured model.
I do not like Sony in the least, but all they are doing here as far as I can tell is putting it all together and they do do that well.
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Sony makes great products, great engineering, and great intentions.
Like intending to install rootkits on people's computers? Fuck you and your employer, shill.
Perhaps a bit jaded...but... (Score:2)
Who read this as saying, "...the factory says that the multiple automated and manual checks have meant that only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped DUE TO defects" I mean, could explain the supply problem. Much more plausible that the entire world is being supplied by a half-dead 89 year old electronics engineer hand-building each one, occasionally losing his glasses between runs, with a crappy 1960's era Radio Shack soldering iron...
Better options for less (Score:1)
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Because it's cheaper, has a huge community and doesn't come with Android.
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Can you run Debian on it? Does it have GPIO?
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How would USB be a replacement for GPIO?
GPIO are useful for interfacing with low level components such as switches, LED, LCD etc. Using USB for this would be overkill.
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The competition isn't spamming (Score:2)
I don't see how the Raspberry Pi can compete with similar products like the MK808 or UG802.
The other vendors aren't spamming all over tech sites.
(The Raspberry Pi people just take a really good system on a chip from China, slap it on a badly laid out board, and act like they've done something important. Annoying.)
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All this selling to us geeks is just to build a community
If they were trying to build a community they would be a lot more open. For example, they would give us their Android sources, and they would have shared that the memory would be getting bigger as soon as they knew. A community is simply happening.
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Twice the power for twice the price doesn't make it a better deal. If the Pi has all the power you need, why spend $25 more for a "better" one?
Also, the GPIO pins. That's not a particularly Android-y feature.
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Me neither. If I knew then what I know now, I'd never have bought an R-Pi. Notably, that the R-Pi foundation would demo Android and then never release it. Bait and switch? Probably not really, but I wouldn't have bought an R-Pi except that they had an announcement about Android working.
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Mod parent up: embedded uses (Score:2)
Indeed, mod parent up. Not all computers have to be networked, plenty of situations where that's a security risk, costs more for the unit.
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Every time you buy a Raspberry Pi... (Score:2)
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I have just run a Raspberry Jam (albeit a little one) because I believe in this Foundation and their stated aims, but I cannot abide SONY and their company ethos vis a vis customer respect and DRM.
If I could I'd buy RasPis that had been made somewhere else. Both of mine came from China, but the one that I got for a friend came from SONY. As will my next one, unfortunately.
Shitty SONY. Bad SONY. May everything you touch (aside from RasPis) turn to sand in your clutches.
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Yes, Sony was evil. Still is, for a large part.
What do you think the best way to change that behavior is?
A) Refuse to buy any of their products, even the non-evil or outright good ones, or
B) Reward them for building good products by buying them, while punishing them by boycotting their evil products
Path A causes them to just stop counting you as a potential customer. So they no longer care at all what you do. In a way, you're like a rabid PS3 fanboy who buys every one of their products - your purchasing dec
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A) Refuse to buy any of their products, even the non-evil or outright good ones, or
Congratulations, you just failed to understand how corporations work. If I give Sony money for one thing, they can use it to develop products over which they intend to bend people and fuck them.
B) Reward them for building good products by buying them, while punishing them by boycotting their evil products
This is not about good products, this is about good behavior. We will reward them for their good behavior as soon as they start exhibiting it. If they don't want us to conflate the actions of Sony Music with Sony Computer Entertainment (both are gigantic douches, though... rootkits and lik-sang respectively, for exam
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Note: Whenever I referred to "good" products in my original post, I was referring to "good" as in "opposite of evil", not "of high quality". I thought that was obvious given how I structured my comparisons, but I guess not.
You also seem to fail to understand how corporations work. I can flip your statement around and have it be just as true: if I give Sony money for one thing, they can use it to develop products to help people and perhaps redeem themselves.
You apparently insist on a complete, 100% change be
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Cheap manufacturing always costs more in the end (Score:3, Interesting)
The UK computer industry enjoyed a mini-rennaisance in 2012 thanks to the popularity of the $40 Raspberry Pi
Are they serious? Do they even know where the ARM SoC is designed?
It amazes me that the Arm Holdings stock was only around $20 a few months ago, when they are without question the most dominant, stable, and secure tech company in the world. Both Apple and Google are completely dependent on the licenses they have acquired from ARM to allow them to use their risc based ultra low power cpu in their devices, and to allow the manufacturers (samsung, ti, etc) to build those chips, and yet in some cases their stocks are twenty times more.
This amazes me, but at least ARM's stock has doubled in the past few months. There is NO bigger player in the computer industry in the world than the UK. I make this claim upon the the fact that now mobile is the dominant platform, and ARM is the only real player in that game (as of yet). Anyone can license and manufacture these chips for cheap and give us crappy hardware as a result, but the ingenuity is in their reduced and low complexity instruction set which allows for their ultra low power design, which is why almost everybody is using their SoC designs.
The only reason that nobody realizes this and their stock has been stagnant in the past is because they don't have a "ARM inside" sticker on every ARM based device made. It there was such a sticker, they would be beyond any doubt the most popular company in the world.
Disclaimer: I am Canadian (and live there at the moment), but I am also a UK citizen. I also don't hold any ARM stocks, though I am kicking myself that I still have yet to acquire any, since it would have almost doubled in value over the past year.
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To reiterate, my comment was that if such stickers existed, then they would be the most popular company in the world, since their chips are used in everything, but unfortunately
25,000CPH?? (Score:1)
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Raspberry Pi IS a low volume prototype product in the world of SMT placement.
It takes cash to buy the parts and build them... They COULD build a years worth in a week... But that's a bad use of Capital investment to tie up money you don't have to. And it takes up floor space. The customer simply can't PAY for more at once. These guys sling parts to get paid... The parts and such are consigned to the end customer.
Most are made in China though (Score:2)
I just got mine 2 days ago, a new Model B Revision 2 board...
they claimed it was made in the UK but when I opened the static bag and pulled out the board a huge "MADE IN CHINA" stamped all over it
here is photo I took of my new model B Revision 2 board - http://www.flickr.com/photos/qoaa/8233431330/ [flickr.com]
you can clearly see made in china
here is another angle with made in china at top - http://www.flickr.com/photos/qoaa/8233433632/ [flickr.com]
My original order was placed in July 5th, 2012 and I just got it on December 1, 2012
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My original order was placed in July 5th, 2012 and I just got it on December 1, 2012 in the mail. I live in Georgia, US so I knew it would take a while to get "across the pond" but was a let down seeing it was made in china when they promised revision 2 boards were made in UK and they clearly are not.
I think you are misremembering.
Quote from the "made in the UK" post
"The upshot of all this? Element14/Premier Farnell have made the decision to move the bulk of their Raspberry Pi manufacture to South Wales."
Note that it is only one of the two manufacturing partners and for that partner it is only "the bulk of their raspberry pi manufacture" not all of it.
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and is obviously not very good at his/her job if he/she can't figure out how to pass content from the server with AJAX.
And if he were reaaally good at his job, he'd know that you don't need AJAX to swap pictures on screen. (Why did the GGP mention it anyway? I don't get it what it has to do with the task at hand anyway.)
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By passing all the image URLs and titles to the client once. Javascript can modify the DOM to replace the images at will by modifying the image source or adding additional image elements. That doesn't take any XMLHttpRequest requests to the server, so its not AJAX.
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and is obviously not very good at his/her job if he/she can't figure out how to pass content from the server with AJAX.
And if he were reaaally good at his job, he'd know that you don't need AJAX to swap pictures on screen. (Why did the GGP mention it anyway? I don't get it what it has to do with the task at hand anyway.)
At least you weren't trying to browse TFA on a tablet or phone...on my iPad, the first page and every other page after that was a warning that the page I wanted wasn't "mobile-optimized." If you can't code your page to be usable on all devices, you're doing it wrong.
(One minor point in their favor: at least they're not using that abortion known as Onswipe. Whoever decided scrolling should be replaced with pagination should be taken outside and shot.)
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Whoever designed the photo album viewer never heard of XMLHttpRequest.
It's all about "page views", baby!
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Yes its just you.
You will always get shit code. Removing JS doesn't help that at all.
Geocities caused horrible atrocities without any JS.
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yes but people end up using JavaScript to much to do things that html and css can do.
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So even if they have defects, they still get shipped, despite the numerous automated and manual checks?
I'm not sure what you mean. No test can capture 100% of all possible faults especially if you include any of the faults that mean things work to begin with but then fail later on (e.g. a weak solder joint will work to begin with, but the increased current density will tend to exacerbate the weak point making it fail terminally).
In any chip itself there will be hard to find points of failure (a metal contact problem causing the pipeline to not flow control properly for example). Or they could be a weak drive
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So even if they have defects, they still get shipped, despite the numerous automated and manual checks? What a way to keep people from being unemployed....
[wdw]
Of course you can get manufactured goods with 100% guarantee of functionality, just like in any industry - see the Space Shuttle software error rate per kLoC. But the point is that this will cost you a lot more. Beyond a certain point, performing extra checks and tests ceases to be economical and, frankly, even becomes a folly IMO. It's easier to offer free replacements with postal fees paid by the manufacturer at that point.
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My 5 that were shipped to the US came from Newark.com and (as mentioned before [slashdot.org]) they were all Made in China.
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In Australia, I ordered two model B boards from element14 on Sunday and they turned up today (Tuesday), just under 50 hours after I ordered.
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Now you know how I've felt for the last year about the kindle fire.
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So... they have about 1,000,000 boards shipped now... What is magic about 1,500,000?
BTW, I can generally get them in about 2-3 weeks from Newark/Element14 so I count that as "generally available" in the US.
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Oh yeah, that makes sense.
But creates British/Welsh jobs... maybe pragmatic. (Score:2)
Maybe they got pragmatic and decided the best way to bring in local jobs (Raspberry Pi = British,so jobs in the UK) was to find an existing plant that could take on the work. Maybe setting up their own factory from scratch was unrealistic for the Raspberry Pi organisation (these guys aren't an existing multinational megacorp, just a start-up, effectively) but they could at least try to get them manufactured in the UK and create some British/Welsh jobs. Perhaps they also felt this would allow them better qua
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The ones from RS are still made in China - so you have a choice.