Hasta La Gadget!

XBMC launched version 12.0 Frodo today, bringing a ton of new features and opening up support to more platforms this time around. The open-source media center software was previously in beta for quite some time, but now it’s available to all, and it comes with a ton of new features that makes version 12 one of XBMC’s biggest updates.

For starters, the ever-popular media center software now fully supports Android and the Raspberry Pi, making it even more tempting to want one of those $35 mini computers. Other new features to version 12 include HD audio support, including DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD, thanks to the new XBMC AudioEngine (OS X and iOS support not yet available, though).

There’s also support for live TV and DVR functionality, as well as 64-bit support in both OS X and Linux. You’ll also get 10-bit H.264 video decoding and improved AirPlay support across all platforms. Other smaller updates include improved controller support in Windows and Linux, advanced filtering, video library tags, and advanced UPnP sharing.

XBMC has certainly come a long way, and those who passed on it because of its lack of several key features may want to give it a second look now. Plus, with support for the Raspberry Pi, we should be seeing tons of new hardware ideas come to fruition from DIYers everywhere. This may just be the version of XBMC that takes DIY home theaters to the next level and beyond.

XBMC 12 Frodo now available with Android and Raspberry Pi support is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Google’s philanthropic arm, Google Giving, has awarded a grant to the U.K.’s Raspberry Pi Foundation to fund 15,000 U.K. schoolchildren to get their very own Raspberry Pi micro computer to learn to code.

The size of the Google Giving grant has not been disclosed by Google but the Foundation describes it as “generous”, and the Model B Pi, which the kids will be getting, retails for $35 — so taken at face retail value the grant is worth $525,000 for the hardware alone. Add in additional teaching materials, support and resources and it’s likely to be worth considerably more than half a million dollars. Update: TechCrunch understands the total grant is worth $1 million — which covers the cost of the devices plus support and teaching materials to ensure the kids get the most out of their free Pi.

Announcing the award in a blog post today, the Foundation revealed Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt spent the morning with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton at a local school in Cambridgeshire — Chesterton Community College – teaching kids about coding and doubtless geeking out over the details of building a $35 micro computer.

The first “tranche” of free Pis were also donated to the class of 12 year-old school pupils, according to Google.

The Foundation said it will be working with Google and six U.K. educational partners to “find the kids who we think will benefit from having their very own Raspberry Pi”. The six partners are CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR – each of whom will be provided with a supply of Pis to give to kids who show interest in computer science courses.

As well as helping the Foundation identify the lucky kids who will get free Pi, the six organisations will also be providing additional help and support. For example, OCR will be creating 15,000 free teaching and learning packs to go with the Raspberry Pis.

The Foundation, which was set up with a mission to get more U.K. schoolkids learning to code, added:

We’re absolutely made up over the news; this is a brilliant way for us to find kids all over the country whose aptitude for computing can now be explored properly. We believe that access to tools is a fundamental necessity in finding out who you are and what you’re good at. We want those tools to be within everybody’s grasp, right from the start.

The really good sign is that industry has a visible commitment now to trying to solve the problem of CS education in the UK. Grants like this show us that companies like Google aren’t prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems we’re all discussing, but want to help tackle them themselves. We’re incredibly grateful for their help in something that we, like them, think is of vital importance. We think they deserve an enormous amount of credit for helping some of our future engineers and scientists find a way to a career they’re going to love.

More than one million Raspberry Pis have been sold since launch, although it’s not clear how many of those have gone to kids — as the Pi has been especially popular among the enthusiast adult maker community.

Commenting on the grant in a statement, Google’s Schmidt said: “Britain’s innovators and entrepreneurs have changed the world — the telephone, television and computers were all invented here. We’ve been working to encourage the next generation of computer scientists and we hope this donation of Raspberry Pi’s to British school pupils will help drive a new wave of innovation.”

It’s not the first time Schmidt  has made comments about the British education system. In August 2011, in a keynote speech at the Edinburgh TV festival, he slammed the system for failing to teach computer science and focusing instead on telling kids how to use software. “That is just throwing away your great computing heritage,” he said at the time.

Since then, the U.K. government has been knocking heads together to try to get a handle on the problem — announcing plans to develop new “IT-centric” qualifications to teach schoolkids core principles of computer programming, and measures to attract and train a new generation of computer science teachers. It’s currently carrying out a curriculum review to come up with a new program of study for the subject — but an all-new computer science curriculum is not due to land in September 2014.

In a statement provided today, the Foundation’s Upton said: “We hope that our new partnership with Google will be a significant moment in the development of computing education in the UK. We believe that this can turn around the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skill sets of students applying to read Computer Science at university.”

Asked why Google is gifting Pis to the U.K. — rather than a developing nation — Upton told TechCrunch: “As I understand it, Google like to support the community in each of the countries where they have a presence. They have a very large engineering organization in the UK now, and so it makes sense to do this sort of activity here. The fact that Eric has a well-known interest in the state of computing education in the UK makes it all the more relevant.”

With all the hoopla around CES, we sadly missed this amazing milestone for one of the greatest little projects I’ve seen in a long time, Raspberry Pi. An estimated one million of these tiny computers have been sold so far, an amazing feat for a tiny $35 circuit board that can boot directly into a streamlined version of Linux.

To celebrate the company released this cute info graphic, informing us that, if stacked end to end, a million Pis would be higher than 111 Empire State Buildings.

We detailed the unique manufacturing challenges associate with the Pi with 4,000 Raspberry Pis leaving a U.K. factory every day – or one every 7.5 seconds.

Raspberry Pis have ended up as the brains for a mini arcade cabinet and a DIY GSM base station. It also runs RISC OS and, more important, is a great way for kids to learn how to use computers without spending a fortune on hardware.

The Raspberry Pi is definitely a cool little computer, and while the system is pretty bare-bones, a couple of accessories will allow users to make it quite useful in a variety of different situations. Enter the Sweetbox case.

The Sweetbox was developed by Paris-based designer Alexander Xanthakis. The translucent polyamide enclosure wraps the credit-sized computer firmly, while leaving the ports accessible so that it can be plugged into a monitor, TV screen and a keyboard. The protective case adds structure and rigidity so that the Raspberry Pi lasts longer and is easier to transport than as a standalone board.

The Sweetbox was launched via a Kickstarter campaign, and you’ll have to pledge at least £15 (~$24 USD) to get yours, letting you turn your $35 PC into a $60 PC. There are also some pricey limited-edition versions of the Sweetbox, including the fluorescent SPACE (shown below) for £100 (~$163 USD) and a version crafted from sterling silver for a whopping £500 (~$813 USD).

[via designboom]

It’s a safe bet that a fair few children of geeky moms and dads will be finding a rectangular-shaped parcel under their holiday tree tomorrow. And when they rip off the shiny wrapping those lucky kids will find an oh-so-tasty Raspberry Pi inside: a $35 mini computer that can play Blueray-quality video and has more graphical power than a Nintendo Wii — although none of that will be immediately obvious. The Pi is a learning tool not a plug-and-play toy.

The first thing the kids are likely to notice after they winkle their Pi out of its antistatic packet is that it looks a bit weird. If they’ve grown up surrounded by slick, shiny consumer gadgets like iPhones and iPads they may never have handled an uncovered circuit board before. Reclaiming electronics from the sealed box approach is all part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s plan to get kids learning to code – curiosity being an essential component of learning and creativity.

So in the spirit of stripping away a few more layers, I’ve been asking the Foundation what the secret is to making a $35 mini computer. The basic recipe is this: having extremely skilful cooks who can craft batch after batch of Raspberry Pis as quickly as possible, and with as few duds as possible.

Many Raspberry Pis are made in the UK, in Sony’s Pencoed factory in Wales which landed a multi-million pound contract to manufacture Pis for one of the Foundation’s Pi licensees, Premier Farnell, back in the fall. Premier Farnell also has two locations in China which produce Pi but the majority of its production (70 percent) is in Pencoed, and in January the factory will account for its entire Pi output. (The Foundation can’t disclose exactly how much of the Pi pie each of its licensees accounts for.)

Sony’s Pencoed factory makes an average of 4,000 Model B Pi‘s every day — or one every 7.5 seconds. Which is hard to imagine when you consider the intricacies involved in churning out thousands of double sided PCBs (printed component boards) with surface mount components on both sides and plated through hole components on the top — with blobs of molten solder being laid down in just the right spots, and the correct components stamped on them at a rate of 5.5 parts per second. And doing it all on a very tight budget.

Boards are made in panels of six Pis which go through four “key processes”: mounting the bottom surface components, mounting the top surface components, mounting the plated through hole components; and then testing and packing.

Pi on a budget

Of course, making a Pi is nowhere near as complex as making a modern smartphone, but the balancing act here is keeping the price down without eroding the distributor’s business model. The most costly components in the Pi are the Processor and Memory core silicon, closely followed by the connectors.

With a $35 price tag (and just $25 for the forthcoming Model A Pi) components have to be bought at the right price but also the right quality — since manufacturing defects also have to be minimised and squeezed out of the production process till they’re barely ever there. It’s no good slowing production either: demand for Pi is so high they have to be able to make thousands per day.

“To achieve the low price whilst still yielding a sustainable business model requires skillful manufacturing optimisation and parts procurement,” says Pi hardware designer and Foundation trustee Pete Lomas (no relation!). “The production line has to run efficiently and deliver a very low failure rate. Component vendors must be selected for both quality and price and any potential changes passed through a detailed selection procedure. It is little use saving 40 cents on the components if the failure rate of finished Raspberry Pi rises. Equally every defect is aggressively pursued to understand it’s root cause and eliminate it.”

“Test failures” do still exist of course, but Lomas says that “to our knowledge” fewer than 100 boards have been returned by users as defective — meaning less than 0.1 percent of boards have slipped through the quality-control net. “Of these, some had physical (transit) damage and others had no fault found, so the actual figure is somewhat lower again,” he adds.

Selling like hot cakes

In terms of keeping up with demand, Lomas admits the Foundation was initially caught on the hop — having drastically underestimated people’s appetite for Pi — which resulted in shipping delays in the early months. “We were caught out by a massive increase in interest in the Pi in the very early days,” he says. “Whilst we were setting up for a modest production run of 20,000 units the expressions of interest overtook us by a factor of 10. At that point we decided to engage with our partners Premier Farnell and RS.

“Even with their significant resources, the logistics of getting components for a hundred thousands of Pis and getting them built was a challenge.”

Unlike an electronics giant like Apple or Samsung, the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation and its suppliers were not in a position to stockpile components prior to launch to scale up for the unexpected surge in demand. (And let’s face it, even Apple can’t always keep up with demand.) Another delaying factor is long lead-times on some of the Pi components, says Lomas.

“[Our partners] didn’t have the opportunity to stockpile before launch (unlike, say, Apple), so things were always going to be tricky. Scalability also depends on the components and the lead-time on some parts, especially the processors, is significant and still can present issues a year in to manufacture.”

The Foundation is expecting to sell about a million Pis in its first year of operation — a far cry from the original 20,000 production run it budgeted for.

Baked in the U.K.

The Raspberry Pi was born in the U.K., so it’s only natural the Foundation wanted Pi to be made in the UK too. Sony’s Pencoed factory was chosen because it ticked a variety of boxes, says Lomas — not least, being open to visits from children to see Pi making in progress.

“Making Raspberry Pi in the UK is a desire that we had on day one. The Foundation’s aim is to encourage children to develop an interest in programming, electronics and related engineering subjects. Having the manufacturing of Pi in a place that we could provide opportunities for ‘show and tell’ was also important and the overall philosophy of the Sony management and staff has been a significant enabler for this,” he tells TechCrunch.

“Sony Pencoed was chosen because both their world-class technical capability and their enthusiasm for the Raspberry Pi project overall. We also should not forget that they offered our licensees a viable cost model on a par with the ‘all in cost’ of Far East manufacture. Equally from a technical point of view, the management and resolution of any design related production issues or optimisations is much easier when they are only a few hours away.”

The factory now has more than 22 staff dedicated to Pi production. The overall lead time from first contact with the factory to hitting “volume production” was around 14 weeks — giving an indication of how long it took Sony to devise the Pi production line. Now there’s a “rolling production forecast” between Premier Farnell and Sony which allows for “a degree of production flexibility” with around a month’s notice, says Lomas.

“The only process that Sony did not already have in their production process was Package on Package. Within the introduction programme they researched the process in depth, selected and installed the equipment and ran trials to validate the process before introducing it to the Pi line,” he adds. 

Another helping of Pi

Asked whether Sony’s factory could scale up to greater production capacity in the future, Lomas says there is “significant extra capacity” that could be brought on stream. “Ultimately it is the licensee’s decision where to place additional capacity, but overall the Sony experience has been excellent,” he adds.

There has been no let up in demand for Pi, according to Lomas, but the Foundation believes its existing Pi factories have enough capacity to keep up with demand. “We hope that in the next few months we will reach equilibrium where manufacturing is balanced (as much as it ever can be) with demand. We have options to increase capacity with our existing manufacturers and so additional factories would in all probability not be required.”

For more on Pi production, Lomas has written an excellent, blow by blow account of the various stages and processes of Sony’s Pencoed Pi production line — such as the reels of surface mount components used to keep production ticking along, how Pi boards are baked (yes really) in giant ovens to make sure all the components are properly adhered, and the perils of “lava accidents.”

The Foundation has also put together a video montage showing some of the Pi production stages: