Raspberry Pi boards set to go on sale
Raspberry Pi open-source Linux computers will go on sale at £16 before the end of February, the project said on Monday.
"We have a date for the first batch: the boards will be finished on February 20," team member Liz Upton wrote in a blog post. "We'll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month."
The boards, which are designed to inspire children to learn how to program, were originally due to roll off the Chinese production line in January. However, problems sourcing a quartz crystal package had delayed things, Upton wrote.
The first generation of $25 (£16) Raspberry Pi boards use a 700MHz ARM processor within a Broadcom BCM2835 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and have a single USB port and 128MB of memory. For a further $10 people can get a version with two USB ports, 10/100 ethernet and 256MB of memory.
Also on Monday the Raspberry Pi project released a datasheet for the Broadcom SoC (PDF).
"Initiatives like the Raspberry Pi scheme will give children the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of programming with their own credit card-sized, single board computers," Michael Gove, the education minister, said in January. "This is a great example of the cutting edge of education technology happening right here in the UK."