Raspberry Pi micro PC arrives in UK, awaits CE certification
Shipments of the Raspberry Pi micro PC have arrived in the UK, but are awaiting CE certification before they officially go on sale.
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The Raspberry Pi micro PC has left its home factory, hopped on a flight to Britain and landed safely, but it's waiting for CE certification before you can take it home and play with it.
The Pi was due to go on sale in February, but overwhelming orders and various problems in the manufacturing process caused several delays, meaning we're still waiting to welcome the little guy. Seriously, we're tired of holding this hand-written sign and airport security are getting tetchy.
The shipments of units have now arrived in the UK, but the manufacturers RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell aren't allowing it to go on sale before it has been fully CE tested. The CE stamp is applied to products sold in the EU that have undergone health, safety and environmental checks.
It doesn't seem to be in line with the wishes of the Pi's original creators, however, who state on the Pi website, "This differs from our view... we believe that the uncased Raspberry Pi is not a 'finished end product', and may be distributed on the same terms as other non-CE-marked platforms [but] we respect their right to make that decision."
You can see Pi's point. The Raspberry Pi is intended to be sold as an educational device -- it comes un-cased and is open to all the tinkering and modifications your imagination and soldering iron can dream up. Any open circuits such as this are naturally going to come with inherent risks, so testing it as a 'finished product' -- as you would do with, say, a laptop -- seems to be missing the point slightly.
Sadly for you and me, there's no precise time on how long this testing will take, but hopefully it won't be many more days before we can get hold of the plucky Pi and start dreaming up ways in which we can build an army of Linux-powered robot soldiers. Or something.
In case this is all nonsense to you, the Raspberry Pi is a Linux-based PC, powerful enough to play Blu-ray quality 1080p video, that's about the size of a deck of cards and costs around £20. It's a charitable pursuit, aimed at providing schools with a cheaper way of teaching kids proper computer science, rather than only let them use word processors on desktop PCs costing several hundred pounds.
If you fancy one, keep your eyes glued to the Raspberry Pi website and in the meantime, check out our complete guide, watch the video below, and let us know in the comments or on our Facebook page exactly what fun you'd want to have with one.
Image credit: Raspberry Pi