For three lucky people, their wish may soon come true. With the single-board computer selling out its initial production run as soon as it went on sale last week (and in the process, crashing the website set up to deal with sales), manufacturing is ramping up as fast as possible.
Now element14 - the collaborative community and electronics store for design engineers and electronics enthusiasts powered by Premier Farnell - is offering the chance to test drive a Raspberry Pi before shipments arrive.
Just enroll in the element14 exclusive Raspberry Road Test today, and tell them what you plan to do with your Pi. The winners will be selected on Pi Day next week, 14 March, and will get a free Raspberry Pi shipped to them.
When their Pi arrives, the winners will blog about it on element14. So, even if you aren't successful, you can see what community members create with this revolutionary device.
https://www.element14.com/community/roadTests/1061
Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is a speaker at the TedxGranta event: Alive & Kicking event tomorrow (9 March)
Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charitable organisation which aims to develop a low cost (£22) computer which will inspire a new generation of computer scientists.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 128 or 256 Megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage. This board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems.
The foundation plans to release two versions; Model A & Model B. Model A will have 128 Megabytes (MB) RAM memory, one USB port and no Ethernet controller, while model B will contain 256MB RAM memory, two USB ports and a 10/100 Ethernet controller.
Though the Model A doesn't have an RJ45 Ethernet port, it can connect to a network by using a user supplied USB Ethernet or Wi-Fi adapter. As typical of modern computers, generic USB keyboards and mice are compatible with the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi use Linux-kernel based operating systems. Debian GNU/Linux, Iceweasel, Calligra Suite and Python are planned to be bundled with the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi does not come with a real-time clock, so an OS must use a network time server, or ask the user for time information at boot time to get access to time and date info for file time and date stamping. However a real time clock (such as the DS1307) with battery backup can be easily added via the I2C interface.
On February 19, 2012 the Raspberry Pi Foundation released its first proof of concept SD Card image that can be loaded onto an SD Card to produce a preliminary operating system. The image is based upon Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), with the LXDE desktop and the Midori browser, plus various programming tools. The image can also run on QEMU allowing the Raspberry Pi to be emulated on various other platforms. The Raspberry Pi Foundation plans to release a version of Fedora later.
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