Factory tour time! Raspberry Pi maven Jeff Geerling recently took a trip to the UK, which included not only a bit of hob-nobbing with Eben Upton, but also a tour of the Sony Tech Center in Wales where Raspberry Pis are made. Everyone loves factory tours, and seeing how Pis get made is especially nice — not to mention seeing Pis piled to the rafters. There are all the usual sights and sounds of a modern electronics factory — the high-speed pick and place, the hand rework of boards that don’t pass QC — but the best part in our book is the line of two-armed collaborative robots working on placing the through-hole components. The little wiggle they give to get Ethernet jacks and other through-hole parts placed is pretty clever, and the fact that they work directly across an assembly line from meat-bots is pretty impressive. Enjoy the tour!

He started a computing REVOLUTION—then the shortage hit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_aL9V0JsQQ

How credit-card size computers are made (Factory Tour)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2C4lbbIH0c

CEO: Raspberry Pi stock to hit 1M units monthly, starting in July
Sony’s helping by stockpiling Pi’s non-silicon parts.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/ceo-raspberry-pi-inventory-to-hit-1m-units-monthly-starting-in-july/

There will be a 1 million unit stock of Raspberry Pi products available in the month of July and every month onward until consumer backlogs are cleared, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton told hobbyists in a recent community newsletter.

As reported by Tom’s Hardware on Thursday, the newsletter, said to be an “update from Eben” (screenshot via Tom’s Hardware here), promises to assuage customer demand after small businesses were favored over individual consumers during the pandemic-fueled silicon shortage.

Upton’s message reportedly reads:

We expect to sell over 600,000 units in May, 800,000 units in June, and from July onward, we are able to sustain million-unit months for as long as is necessary to clear our remaining customer backlogs and return to free availability.

This is despite the approximately 800,000 units shipped in Q1, the company’s “worst quarter since 2015,” according to the newsletter.

Thanks to Revolution Pi for sending this RevPi Connect S along with the Compute Module 4S.

Contents:

00:00 – Revolution Pi’s problem – no Pis!
00:43 – Compute Module 4, with an S
02:27 – Delidded, accidentally
03:26 – A drop-in replacement (mostly)
03:51 – DIN-rail industrial computer
04:39 – The biggest downside