
Raspberry Pi: We’ve started manufacture  - pauldino
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509
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ck2
_if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a
British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most
components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made
abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto
it – it does not attract any import duty at all_

Wow this sounds worse than job exporting in the USA

~~~
marchdown
I wonder if these restrictions could be circumvented somehow by transporting
components in a form which is technically a functioning assembly.

~~~
kevinpet
Not exactly what you were getting at, but Ford does something similar with the
Transit Connect. It's imported as a passenger wagon with back seats and
windows, which are removed in the US.

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blhack
The people behind raspi seem really, genuinely good. If this is all marketing,
it doesn't feel like it.

They're going to do what manufacturing they _can_ in the UK, even though it
would net them a lot more money to do it overseas. Awesome.

~~~
brador
I love the speed they're working at and their no excuses, no BS approach. It's
surprisingly refreshing.

Are they funded?

~~~
lftl
I have no clue as to their financial status, but Liz (one of the team members)
said this in the comments:

 _Indeed – and I’m pretty sure that those psychic people would be a bit more
cautious if it was their mortgage that this thing was secured on_

~~~
andyking
It says in the blurb at the bottom of the page that Liz is a "full time
volunteer." Why can't they pay someone to do their PR if they're funded?

~~~
skrebbel
Not sure about UK, but in the Netherlands, volunteers often get a "costs
reimbursement". If you're a full time volunteer, that reimbursment may roughly
equal a crappy salary. Maybe that's what Liz is getting, too.

It'd be nothing like what she could earn in industry, but enough to keep a
roof over her head and food on the table. And a Raspberry Pi in every room.

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Nate75Sanders
Hopefully some nice cases will come out. I'd like to see one with an
integrated USB hub.

Additionally, as it takes USB power for the computer itself, having a monitor
with USB ports would enable you to power the entire computer with only a short
USB cable. You could then mount the small case to the back of the monitor,
perhaps to make everything neat.

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dman
The pricepoint is simply revoultionary. I intend to make a few amateur home
automation gadgets with this.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Actually I was thinking 'unsustainable' rather than revolutionary.

Having lived in/through/with the birth/blossoming/commercialization of both
the microcomputer and the non-factory robotics businesses, I find the
breathless ecstasy of 'getting into production' a wonderful thing, but its a
lot like falling in love, there are a lot of things that happen next that
you're going to have to live through.

Given that they are taking nearly zero margin on these devices (at least
according to this post), they have many pot holes to look out for:

1) Their Chinese factory turns out to be some guy's brother-in-law who got
them a cheap price because he's using counterfeit parts. Or worse the guy that
bid for the job expects to build the factory to build them with the money your
going to pay him up front.

2) Their board vendor tech sneezed and accidentally added a direct short to
the films they are using to make the boards.

3) The part they ordered for the USB connector is discontinued by the vendor
who gave them a price of $0.25 and its now only available from some other
vendor for $2.25 each.

4) The pick and place robot put a set of boards on 90 degrees out of kilter,
so the entire batch has all the parts soldered into the wrong places.

5) The customs guys open them up, and not seeing the requisite safety
symbol/OfCom/FCC/ISO/CET whatever certificate denies them entry into the
country

The list goes on and on. One of the challenges of manufacturing is knowing not
only what the parts cost but what costs the system is going to impose on you.
You need to build in a margin that covers both otherwise you'll underestimate
what it will cost you to build a product.

So new manufacturing experience aside (and its going to be a great learning
experience if they can keep reminding themselves that it is a learning
experience), it sounds like they have a really great way of bringing home to
the politicians how their policies affect jobs locally. It almost seems like a
reasonably responsive government should sponsor some group to manufacture a
new product domestically and then carefully track the barriers to doing so and
eliminate those that are amenable to a political fix. Tariffs on imported
semi-conductors (protecting the local fabs?) and electronic components when
such components cannot be locally sourced seems like a good starting point.

I certainly hope they will be able bring that message clearly to Parliament.
It would be refreshing to have really hard to object to facts in the debates
going on.

~~~
tankenmate
Have you guys really been reading about the raspberry pi? The founder is an
SoC architect at Broadcom, I'm sure they'll find a reputable and cost
effective manufacturing partner with their industry contacts.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Yes, I've been reading their stuff. And I'm hoping they are wildly successful!
But I had to chuckle at your comment that their founder is an SoC architect
because it reminded me of a really funny moment at this company I helped start
back in the mid 90's. We had this new PCI card that we were getting
manufactured for our systems and the guy who designed it was complaining about
the delays in getting cards to put into test systems. Our director of
manufacturing was really pissed off at the emails he was dealing with asking
why things weren't ready and his response was along the lines of

"... some architect designs something and thinks that I can just bend over and
pull a few thousand out of my ass. Doesn't he get that someone has to build
the fucking thing and then somehow we have get them here?"

It was my first exposure to the more sordid details of getting a piece of
hardware from prototype into production. For years up to that point I could
easily get 10 or 100 of something made, but I hadn't ever tried to get 10,000
made, or had contracts in place to have them made on a regular basis.

Manufacturing acuity is not in the standard make up of senior technical
people, its a process puzzle but with people rather than logic, with
regulations rather than resource constraints, and with cash rather than
electricity. The art of creating streams of parts which arrive at facility to
take part in a process of assembly (and perhaps sub assembly) test and
delivery, is a very different skill than designing an SoC.

That being said, its an amazing sight to behold when its all working right,
sort of an eternal Rube Goldberg machine. And some folks make it look
effortless.

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rch
It is interesting that they at least explored the idea of building in the UK,
and that tax policies factored in so negatively. Does the US have similarly
structured import taxes?

~~~
njharman
I don't know about import taxes. But, US does not have a VAT like UK. It has a
sales tax which is only paid by the end user. Usually the consumer. Materials
like cotton (and I guess electronic parts) used in manufacture aren't taxed
(at least not with a sales/VAT).

~~~
IgorPartola
No? I was under the impression that if I wanted to buy a bunch of cotton or
silicone or diodes that I'd have to pay taxes on that. Then once I manufacture
my awesome device using only those materials, plus a Swiss army knife and a
rubber band, I could sell it to you and you'd get to pay another round of
sales tax. On the backend of this transaction of course is the machinery used
to harvest/manufacture the raw materials, for which the farmer/manufacturer
also paid a sales tax on. Unless there is some kind of subsidy at play here.

~~~
klodolph
This is per-state. For example, Oregon has no sales tax except for a couple
things like tobacco and gasoline. Most states which have sales tax only have
_retail_ sales tax (plus a couple random ones). But no, wholesale is generally
not taxed. (This is the difference between "sales tax", which happens when the
end product goes to the consumer, and "value added tax", which happens
multiple times. I don't think a single state will tax you on a box of diodes
you order from your supplier, but if you go to Radio Shack they'll probably
tax you.)

~~~
IgorPartola
Thanks! Follow up question: what is wholesale? Can I buy a yaer's worth of
potatoes tax free? How about a lifetime supply of socks?Or are we talking
about huge quantities?

~~~
tomku
(Warning: This post contains lots of generalizations, because every US state
has different laws. Look up your state's regulations regarding sales tax if
you want to be sure.)

In this context, "wholesale" has nothing to do with the quantities and
everything to do with the intended usage. If you're intending to make a
product or perform a service which would require you to charge sales tax to
YOUR customer, then you can usually avoid paying sales tax to your suppliers,
because otherwise the state would be collecting from both you when you buy
components and your customer when you sell the finished product. That would
get sorted out when you file your sales tax return, but it's easier to only
have one link in the chain actually pay the tax in the first place and avoid
the situation entirely.

Basically, the idea is that unless the buyer or item being sold is
specifically covered under an exemption, sales tax should be applied precisely
once on its journey from raw material to the hands of its first actual owner,
preferably as late as possible so as to capture the product when it's at
maximum taxable value. This is in contrast to a VAT, where the tax is applied
at every step in the process proportional to how much "value" was added at
that step.

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patrickod
I don't see the first 10 thousand boards lasting very long on their shelves. I
can't wait to get my hands on one.

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noonespecial
I think they're dead wrong about the demand of the model B, vs the model A. I
think most people are going to want to buy a model A for $10 less and stick a
sub-$10 usb wifi onto it than run a wire.

Most of the projects I think of and don't build are scrapped for want of $50
worth of ridiculous "zigbee" wireless hardware that can barely push 250kbits
across the room. The internet of things is made of wifi.

~~~
genbattle
But what about the extra 128MB of ram, and the extra USB port?

Also, You'd be hard pressed to get a USB Wifi Stick for less than the cost of
the whole Raspberry Pi board in my country. Plus as you add more devices Wifi
can get very saturated. Installation and configuration of USB Wifi adapters
under Linux is a bit of a challenge. Ethernet on the other hand is practically
plug and play.

There are also plenty of ideas which can use wired networking. Ideas from home
automation to set-top boxes to microservers are all going to benefit from a
more stable and high-bandwidth wired connection.

For general tinkering I would rather pay the extra $10 or whatever and get
more options in terms of the hardware.

~~~
someperson
See eBay, even with shipping sub-$10NZ is easily possible. "nano" dongles
especially.

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yanksrock777
I am waiting for the day I can buy one of these. Ok maybe I'll be like five.
These will be so much fun to mess and hack around with. I can't believe that
this is the price of an Arduino!

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DrinkWater
There are some discussions about the supported OS's in the Raspberry Pi
Forums. And this is what is still holding me back from dancing and screaming
about this project.

~~~
dspillett
This is something I need to look into. I'll be buying one B when they are
available anyway, but may get more depending on a few things including the OS
question. The claimed "can play 1080p h264 video at 30fps" claim is most
interesting to me, _but_ if I slap Debian on there (which seems to be the
suggested distro) will it be able to use that hardware video acceleration out
of the box or will I need to jump through a few nasty hoops to get some
proprietary chipset driver to cooperate?

~~~
DrinkWater
Exactly!

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willyt
I don't understand why Raspberry Pi doesn't have to pay VAT on the assembled
imported items? Is it because they are a charity?

EDIT: added 'assembled'. Does anyone have a link to the IR rules about this?

~~~
roel_v
It doesn't say VAT, it's import duties.

~~~
willyt
All right then, why is there no _import duty_ (which is charged at the same
rate as VAT) on a Raspberry PI when there is on a stick of RAM? Genuine
question: I'm curious to know how the rules define one item as separate from
the other.

Edit: OK sorry my comment was a load of crap, I was confused. They charge both
VAT @%20 _and_ duty @~3% but duty is only charged on a massive and seemingly
random list of things.

~~~
objclxt
They are probably classifying their product as a 'palm-top computer', which
attracts no import duty. But the component parts (the chips, etc) almost
certainly will. For reasons I gave in my reply above, I couldn't tell you the
exact duty amounts, but there is a link here that details the duty for palm-
top computers:

[http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPort...](http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPortalWebApp.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageVAT_ShowContent&id=HMCE_PROD_009989&propertyType=document)

I seem to remember this being the case when I imported some Beagleboards into
the UK for R&D work, and didn't pay import duty on them.

~~~
justincormack
That is the most bizarre list of random tax rates. I always seem to get
charged a lot so will appeal next time based on whether my player is mp3 or
mp4 or whatever. And I might complain to my MP about the taxes on 35mm film
cameras. Bizarre.

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rmoriz
There is also another interesting board project in the UK, but it's still in
the design-phase:

<http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10>

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Maven911
Am i missing something here, some versions of the andruino seems to be in a
similar price range (at mouser.com), or is this board vastly superior to the
cheap model andruinos ?

~~~
adestefan
The Adruino is built around the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller line. It also
exposes numerous digital, PWM, and analog pins for easy hookup to external
devices. It is in no way a general use computer.

The Raspberry PI has a 32-bit ARM chip that can run Linux. It has a video
output, USB for keyboard and mouse, and one version has an Ethernet port. It's
aim is to make a cheap general purpose Linux system.

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RexRollman
I will order one once OpenBSD is running on it, which I am willing to bet
won't be too long.

~~~
justincormack
Buy one and make it run on it then.

~~~
Karunamon
Not exactly a reasonable proposition for most mortals.

~~~
Jach
Any mortal who _wants_ to run BSD is most likely also capable of _installing_
BSD. (For that matter I'm sure the majority of people who have just _heard of_
BSD are capable of installing it.) Furthermore it's no more difficult getting
up and running than on a desktop since the Arm is supported by the kernel; you
just load everything on the SD card and the pre-installed uboot (or whatever
they have on there) will boot off of it.

~~~
simias
It's not that simple, an ARM board is not a PC, you don't have a BIOS for
instance. Basically you have to write some glue to tell the kernel what and
where are the devices and how to access them.

See for instance in Linux <http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/arm> for
the various Board Support Packages available upstream.

Not to mention that while OpenBSD supports the ARM _architecture_ it might not
have drivers for all the IPs integrated in the SoC.

So basically, it won't be plug'n'play like installing a new OS on your new x86
computer, altho the amount of work required to get it to work might not be
completely overwhelming if you know what you have to do (especially since the
linux source code is available).

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drtse4
The first batch will be of 10k boards. Will be sold out in a few hours...

~~~
jamesRaybould
It appears that you spelt minutes wrong. Just take a look at the massive fire
sale that revolved around the HP Touchpad and I think thats the kind of
interest this will receive.

~~~
corin_
I don't think they'll receive nearly as much general interest as the touchpad,
one is a device that consumers can see as "like an iPad, but amazingly cheap",
the other as "a programmable system for geeks".

Certainly I know friends who bought the fire sale touchpads, and many more who
would have if they had the chance, none of which will be buying the raspberry
pi - except the really techy ones.

Also, to do with the press it will get. Articles of "huge fire sale, get one
while you can!" will be replaced with "this could change education" and "look
what you could create with these" pieces.

Don't get me wrong, they will be hugely popular, and 10,000 is far less than
the number of touchpads there were. It will also depend, obviously, on the
per-customer limits they put in place.

I certainly expect them to sell out fast (will it be minutes, hours or days, I
have no idea), but to compare the level of interest to the touchpad fire sale
is huge exaggeration.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I thought about putting an order in for 10K boards. I think if you look at the
'tv dongles' which is basically a small system running a flavor of Linux
driving a TV [1] you'll find at $35 each they are a no-brainer. Here's a dead
simple idea, TV dongle with Web cam for 'facetime' on your TV. If you've got a
cable IP network, you use Skype or some variation (hell Google talk w/ Video)
and you're done. Plastic molded case and poof.

Using the camera and simple gestures (think Kincect 0.5) make an instant
'hangout' using G+ on your TV. Wave your hand, point at your circle, and blam
start hanging out.

I've got like a zillion ideas of ways to turn a $35 board with HDMI+Networking
into serious bank. I'm not unique in this regard.

[1] <http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/hdmidongle.htm>

~~~
noonespecial
I really hope projects like RasPi speedily dispatch companies like that one
into irrelevance. Their entire business model seems to be taking some open
source, putting it into a poorly made prototype and then slathering the whole
mess with patents. They don't make anything but bills and lawsuits.

Tiny full-fledged networked computers that are almost free they're so cheap
will have a nasty habit of turning previous hardware into easily written
software. The patent office/"industry" hasn't the slightest notion of whats
about to hit them.

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suhastech
Well, outsourcing to China is probably "charity".

Think about it. If people are working there accept such low wages, they
probably don't have other options. The alternative is, lower wages?

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mjwalshe
Hmm - I will be contacting a few MP's about this nonsensical tax situation.

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lateral11
Not buying one until it's made in UK.

~~~
sliverstorm
Best way to get it made in the UK would seem to be to buy one and support the
movement so that they can continue pressuring the government to allow them to
make them in the UK.

I mean really, who are you protesting against? The government, right? What
does the government care if you don't buy a $25 gadget?

~~~
lateral11
I would pay more than 25 GBP were it made in the UK. And this isn't a movement
-- it's not "occupy".

