Hasta La Gadget!

The Raspberry Pi microcomputer prides itself on being affordable, with its tiny $35 price-tag for the original Model B Pi. But now its lowest cost board — the $25 Model A — has gone on sale in the U.S. The Raspberry Pi Foundation confirmed to TechCrunch that Model A can now be purchased in the U.S. via reseller Allied Electronics (which currently appears to have 70 units in stock).

What does $25 buy you? Enough processing power to use it to run a home media centre if you so desire, according to the Foundation. But the Model A was conceived with lower power consumption projects in mind, perhaps battery or solar powered, as Model A consumes around a third less power than Model B. It also has half the RAM of the second revision Model B, plus only one USB port and no Ethernet connection — to keep costs down.

Model A sales kicked off in Europe in early February, with Asia coming on stream last week. Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi founder, said today that sales of the Model A Pi have been amounting to “a few thousand a week” thus far.

“We burned through the first 20,000 units quite quickly, and are building a few thousand a week at the moment, but we don’t have good visibility of sell through yet,” he told TechCrunch when asked about early sales data, adding: “I’d expect us to dip in and out of availability for the next month or so until we reach a steady state.”

The Foundation passed  one million Model B sales in January, less than a year after it launched the Pi in March 2012. The microcomputer was conceived as a tool to get kids learning to code – but has also proved popular with the maker community to power all manner of DIY gizmos and gadgets.

Raspberry Pi‘s Model B computer will be no stranger to regular readers. We’ve seen it turn up in all sorts of projects, and generally stretched in various directions. If you were holding out for the cheaper, lower specced Model A however, your time is near. A recent post on the official Raspberry Pi site confirms that the first Model A samples are rolling off the production line. The main differences? Whereas Model B has two USB ports and 512 MB of RAM plus Ethernet, Model A sports only the one port, has half the RAM, and no Ethernet connection, making it more power economical as well as $10 cheaper. Price likely isn’t the issue here, but if you were after the even more stripped back version, it’s estimated they’ll be ready to purchase online early next year.

Filed under: Desktops

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Source: Raspberry Pi