The Raspberry Pi computer, launched in February, has finally arrived in the UK, but the distributors have refused to ship it before it gets the “European Community” certification mark.
The first batch of 2,000 boards arrived in the UK on Monday, but it requires testing before it can be sent to customers. Raspberry Pi Foundation previously believed certification will not be necessary.
Both official distributors (RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell) are not willing to ship the Raspberry Pi until it has received the quality control CE mark. The mark was previously overlooked because the Raspberry Pi Foundation believed its computer is not a “finished end product”, so it didn’t require certification. It is now working to get the devices CE marked “as soon as is humanly possible”.
The Foundation expects emissions from the uncased product to meet category A requirements comfortably without modification.
It is also talking to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, to better understand the terms under which other devices without certification are permitted to ship to domestic end users in the UK, and to find out it it can distribute Raspberry Pi on the same terms.
At the moment, Raspberry Pi still doesn’t have a definite shipping date. It was previously set for January release, but, as a statement on the Foundation’s blog put it, “We’re not counting our chickens before they’ve been hatched and inspected in very great detail to make sure that they are not mutant lizards.”
There had been a serious hiccup in manufacturing process earlier this month, when the Chinese factory responsible for miniature computers decided to solder in non-magnetic Ethernet jacks instead of magnetic ones. The problem has now been fixed.
Raspberry Pi contains a 700MHz ARM11 processor, VideoCore IV GPU and 256MB of RAM. There is no hard disk on board; the computer uses an SD card instead, and USB connectivity can be used to provide another storage port. The available connections include an HDMA port, RCA video port, and a 3.5 mm audio jack. Pi can work with any of the Linux operating systems, such as Debian, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu or Fedora.
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Thought anything from China just had a CE sticker put on irrespective!
This deserves to be successful. I sincerely wish them every success, and will be buying one as soon as possible.
What's the problem?
Except for very few product categories where an external certification agency has to certify the product before a CE mark can be applied (and the raspberry pi does definitely NOT fall into any such category), the CE mark is just a mark by which THE MANUFACTURER OR IMPORTER certifies that his product complies with all European requirements and directives that apply to the product category (and they have to be explicitly listed in a conformance declaration inside manual or notice of the product)
In other words: the PI foundation or whoever imports these boards to europe only have to:
a) find out which directives apply to such boards
b) write a short conformance statement in the manual (dito)
c) apply a ce sticker to the product
£22? - I pre-ordered one last month for £29.46 and still waiting delivery.