How do you make Raspberry Pi? [video] | Hacker News Reader

How do you make Raspberry Pi? [video]

bbc.co.uk

31 pointsjunto7 comments

On the subject of "Trying this at home", it turns out you can approximate this type of manufacturing process at home with under $500 worth of tools!

The uncommon things you need are:

1. Custom PCB (http://oshpark.com/ $1.66/sq. in., min. only 3 copies of board)

2. Stencil for your custom PCB (http://www.oshstencils.com/ $.60/sq. in.)

3. Solder paste [different than regular solder, it's glue-like at room temperature rather than solid] (http://www.smtsolderpaste.com/ there may be better vendors for paste, I've used these guys. Anyone have suggestions?)

4. Heat Source, for on-the-cheap use either a high-wattage toaster oven or hot plate (never to be used with food again!) See Sparkfun's writeup on it here:https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/59

As you can see, as pg said the hardware renaissance is coming (http://www.paulgraham.com/hw.html). As an example oshstencils.com just launched a few months ago and before that it was a minimum of $30+ for even the cheapest mylar stencil vendors. Things are moving fast!

I agree that a lot of this stuff is surprisingly affordable and doable with low-cost equipment. That said, it's worth noting that in the case of the Raspberry Pi the BGA package of the BCM2835, even were it available in small quantities makes it infeasible to work with at home. For instance to break out the pins from the BGA you're going to need blind vias (OSHpark doesn't support this, plus the pi needs a 6-layer PCB). The RAM is soldered on top of the BCM2835 in a package on package configuration. I found oshstencils just yesterday, it looks great! As you can say, you can make some seriously impressive circuits at low cost with vendors like these.

"Don't try this at home?" I know it's a throwaway a line, but that's exactly what people should be doing!

While schematics are available, board layout for the Pi is not, and I see precisely no reasons for not distributing it openly. Raspberry Pi has nothing to do with open hardware.

The whole system cannot function without the GPU as it’s the first component to boot and controls some vital peripherals, and the GPU can only work with a closed-source firmware.

Oh, and before calling this a conspiracy theory, take a look at the sister site of Pi Foundation. That’s right: instead of promoting free, open and royalty-free standards like WebM, the Foundation sells licenses for two proprietary and obsolete video encoders. Also, if you want the Foundation to send more documentation to you, they require you to provide a business model. This has nothing to do with education and everything with marketing.

Fortunately, not Beagle Board nor ODROID-X require GPU drivers (or, for that matter, any proprietary code or binaries at all) for regular operation. You’d only need them for rendering accelerated graphics.

If you are looking to develop truly open hardware, take a look at Milkymist One. It isn’t cheap, but is worth way more than its cost.

If you are looking for a more sane alternative to Pi, consider buying Texas Instruments Beagle Board or Samsung ODROID-X. Both vendors have released complete documentation for the SoC (except for the graphics processor, described above), and are generally more friendly to open-source community than Broadcom.

http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-un...

Licenses for video codecs are sold because people want them, the chip can decode them, and it would obviously be stupid to bake that cost in to the base price when only a subset of users want them. The Foundation doesn't want to see your business model - they don't distribute VideoCore documentation, that is intellectual property of Broadcom and they decide who they share it with.

As a Welshman, it is nice to see these being manufactured in Wales. Shows that we don't have to outsource our manufacturing to the Far East.

The key thing to note is how much of the manufacturing process is completely automated. Due to the huge volumes of the rPi it is cost-effective to automate almost the entire process.

On the other hand, for products expected to sell only in the thousands or tens of thousands it turns out human labor is cheaper. In the rPi's case, notice that it got soldered twice. Once for SMD (surface mount device) parts and once for the larger through-hole parts. In general, if there aren't going to be huge volumes humans will hand solder the through hole parts since a separate wave-soldering machine is needed to do this automatically. As another example take a look at the custom testing jig they shelled out for. That is easily thousands of dollars if not even north of 10K. Again in small volumes it would make more sense for humans to spend the extra effort setting up the board for testing.

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